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WOOD AND STONE 



Books by 
JOHN GOWPER POWYS 

The Wab and Culture, 1914 . $ .60 
Visions and Revisions, 1915 . £2.00 



PUBLISHED BY G. ARNOLD SHAW 
GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, NEW YORK 



WOOD AND STONE 

A ROMANCE 



BY 

JOHN COWPER POWYS 



Licuit, semperque licebit 
Parcere personis, dicere de vitiis. 




1915 
G. ARNOLD SHAW 

NEW YORK 






COPYRIGHT, 1915 
BY G. ARNOLD SHAW 



COPYRIGHT IN GREAT BRITAIN 
AND COLONIES 



NOV -6 1915 
©CI.A416255 



DEDICATED 

WITH DEVOTED ADMIRATION 

TO THE GREATEST POET AND NOVELIST 

OF OUR AGE 

THOMAS HARDY 



PREFACE 

THE following narrative gathers itself round 
what is, perhaps, one of the most absorbing 
and difficult problems of our age; the problem 
namely of getting to the bottom of that world-old 
struggle between the "well-constituted" and the "ill- 
constituted," which the writings of Nietzsche have 
recently called so startlingly to our attention. 

Is there such a thing at all as Nietzsche's born and 
trained aristocracy? In other words, is the secret 
of the universe to be reached only along the lines of 
Power, Courage, and Pride? Or, — on the contrary, 
— is the hidden and basic law of things, not Power 
but Sacrifice, not Pride but Love? 

Granting, for the moment, that this latter alterna- 
tive is the true one, what becomes of the drastic 
distinction between "well-constituted" and "ill-con- 
stituted"? 

In a universe whose secret is not self-assertion, but 
self-abandonment, might not the "well-constituted" 
be regarded as the vanquished, and the "ill-consti- 
tuted" as the victors? In other words, who, in such 
a universe, are the "well-constituted"? 

But the difficulty does not end here. Supposing we 
rule out of our calculation both of these antipodal 
possibilities, — both the universe whose inner fatality 
is the striving towards Power, and the universe whose 
inner fatality is the striving towards Love, — will 



viii PREFACE 



there not be found to remain two other rational 
hypotheses, either, namely, that there is no inner 
fatality about it at all, that the whole thing is a 
blind, fantastic, chance-drifting chaos; or that the 
true secret lies in some subtle and difficult reconcil- 
iation, between the will to Power and the will to 
Love? 

The present chronicle is an attempt to give an 
answer, inevitably a very tentative one, to this 
formidable question; the writer, feeling that, as in 
all these matters, where the elusiveness of human 
nature plays so prominent a part, there is more hope 
of approaching the truth, indirectly, and by means of 
the imaginative mirror of art, than directly, and by 
means of rational theorizing. 

The whole question is indeed so intimately asso- 
ciated with the actual panorama of life and the 
evasive caprices of flesh and blood, that every kind 
of drastic and clinching formula breaks down under 
its pressure. 

Art, alone, — that mysterious daughter of Life, — 
has the secret of following the incalculable move- 
ments of the Force to which she is so near akin. A 
story which grossly points its moral with fixed in- 
dicative finger is a story which, in the very strain of 
that premature articulation, has lost the magic of 
its probability. The secret of our days flies from 
our attempts at making it fit such clumsy categories, 
and the maddening flavour of the cosmic cup refuses 
to be imprisoned in any laboratory. 

At this particular moment in the history of our 
planet it is above all important to protest against 
this prostituting of art to pseudo-science. It must 



PREFACE ix 



not be allowed to these hasty philosophical conclu- 
sions and spasmodic ethical systems, to block up and 
close in, as they are so ready to do, the large free 
horizons of humour and poetry. The magic of the 
world, mocking both our gravity and our flippancy, 
withdraws itself from our shrewd rationalizations, only 
to take refuge all the deeper in our intrinsic and 
evasive hearts, j 

In this story the author has been led to inter- 
est himself in the curious labyrinthine subtleties 
which mark the difference, — a difference to be ob- 
served in actual life, quite apart from moral values, — 
between the type of person who might be regarded 
as born to rule, and the type of person who might 
be regarded as born to be ruled over. The grand 
Nietzschean distinction is, in a sense, rejected here 
upon its own ground, a ground often inconsequently 
deserted by those who make it their business to con- 
demn it. Such persons are apt to forget that the 
whole assumption of this distinction lies in a substi- 
tution of cesthetic values, for the values more com- 
monly applied. 

The pivotal point of the ensuing narrative might 
be described as an attempt to suggest, granting such 
an aesthetic test, that the hearts of "ill-constituted" 
persons, — the hearts of slaves, Pariahs, cowards, 
outcasts, and other victims of fate, — may be at 
least as interesting, in their bizarre convolutions, as 
the hearts of the bravest and gayest among us. And 
interest, after all, is the supreme exigency of the 
aesthetic sense! 

In order to thrust back from its free horizons these 
invasions of its prerogatives by alien powers, Art 



PREFACE 



must prove itself able to evoke the very tang and 
salt and bitter-sweetness of the actual pell-mell of 
life — its unfolding spaces, its shell-strewn depths. 
She must defend herself from those insidious traitors 
in her own camp who would betray her into the hands 
of the system-makers, by proving that she can ap- 
proach nearer to the magic of the world, without a 
system, than all these are able to do, with all of 
theirs ! She must keep the horizons open — that must 
be her main concern. She must hold fast to poetry 
and humour, and about her creations there must be 
a certain spirit of liberation, and the presence of 
large tolerant after-thoughts. 

The curious thing about so many modern writers 
is, that in their earnest preoccupation with philo- 
sophical and social problems, they grow strained and 
thin and sententious, losing the mass and volume, as 
well as the elusive-blown airs, of the flowing tide. 
On the other hand there is an irritating tendency, 
among some of the cleverest, to recover their lost 
balance after these dogmatic speculations, by foolish 
indulgence in sheer burlesque — burlesque which is 
the antithesis of all true humour. 

Heaven help us! It is easy enough to criticize 
the lath and plaster which, in so many books, takes 
the place of flesh and blood. It is less easy to catch, 
for oneself, the breath of the ineffable spirit! 

Perhaps the deplorable thinness and sententiousness, 
to which reference has been made, may be due to 
the fact that in the excitement of modern contro- 
versy, our enterprising writers have no time to read. 
It is a strange thing, but one really feels as though, 
among all modern English authors, the only one who 



PREFACE xi 



brings with him an atmosphere of the large mellow 
leisurely humanists of the past, — of the true classics, 
in fact, — is Mr. Thomas Hardy. 

It is for this reason, for the reason that with this 
great genius, life is approached in the old ample 
ironic way, that the narrator of the following tale 
has taken the liberty of putting Mr. Hardy's name 
upon his title-page. In any case mere courtesy and 
decency called for such a recognition. One could 
hardly have the audacity to plant one's poor standard 
in the heart of Wessex without obeisance being paid 
to the literary over-lord of that suggestive region. 

It must be understood, however, that the temerity 
of the author does not carry him so far as to regard 
his eccentric story as in any sense an attempted 
imitation of the Wessex novelist. Mr. Hardy cannot 
be imitated. The mention of his admirable name at 
the beginning of this book is no more than a humble 
salutation addressed to the monarch of that par- 
ticular country, by a wayward nomad, lighting a 
bivouac-fire, for a brief moment, in the heart of a 
land that is not his. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Leo's Hill 1 

II. Nevilton 9 

III. Olympian Conspiracy 21 

IV. Reprisals from Below 33 

V. Francis Taxater 53 

VI. The Pariahs 80 

VII. Idyllic Pleasures 109 

VIII. The Mythology of Sacrifice . . . 134 

IX. The Mythology of Power .... 156 

X. The Orchard 184 

XI. Art and Nature 212 

XII. Auber Lake 247 

XIII. Lacrima 276 

XIV. Under-Currents 317 

XV. Mortimer Romer 355 

XVI. Hullaway 386 

XVII. Sagittarius 430 

XVIII. Voices by the Way 460 

XIX. Planetary Intervention 489 

XX. Vox Populi 519 

XXI. Cesar's Quarry 536 

XXII. A Royal Watering-Place 572 

XXIII. Ave atque Vale! 595 



XIV 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

XXIV. The Granary 621 

XXV. Metamorphosis 650 

XXVI. Various Encounters 667 

XXVII. Vennie Seldom 679 

XXVIII. Lodmoor 696 

XXIX. The Goat and Boy 714 



WOOD AND STONE 



CHAPTER I 

LEO'S HILL 

MIDWAY between Glastonbury and Brid- 
port, at the point where the eastern plains 
of Somersetshire merge into the western 
valleys of Dorsetshire, stands a prominent and 
noticeable hill; a hill resembling the figure of a 
crouching lion. 

East of the hill, nestling at the base of a cone- 
shaped eminence overgrown with trees and topped 
by a thin Thyrsus-like tower, lies the village of 
Nevilton. 

Were it not for the neighbourhood of the more 
massive promontory this conical protuberance would 
itself have stood out as an emphatic landmark; 
but Leo's Hill detracts from its emphasis, as it 
detracts from the emphasis of all other deviations 
from the sea-level, between Yeoborough and the 
foot of the Quantocks. 

It was on the apex of Nevilton Mount that the 
Holy Rood of Waltham was first found; but with 
whatever spiritual influence this event may have en- 
dowed the gentler summit, it is not to it, but to 
Leo's Hill, that the lives and destinies of the people 
of Nevilton have come to gravitate. One might 



2 WOOD AND STONE 

indeed without difficulty conceive of a strange 
supernatural conflict going on between the conse- 
crated repository of Christian tradition guarding its 
little flock, and the impious heathen fortress to which 
day by day that flock is driven, to seek their material 
sustenance. 

Even in Pre-Celtic times those formidably dug 
trenches and frowning slopes must have looked down 
on the surrounding valley; and to this day it is the 
same suggestion of tyrannical military dominance, 
which, in spite of quarries and cranes and fragrant 
yellow gorse, gives the place its prevailing character. 

The rounded escarpments have for centuries been 
covered with pleasant turf and browsed upon by 
sheep; but patient antiquarian research constantly 
brings to light its coins, torques, urns, arrow-heads, 
amulets; and rumour hints that yet more precious 
things lie concealed under those grassy mounds. 

The aboriginal tribes have been succeeded by the 
Celt; the Celt by the Roman; the Roman by the 
Saxon; without any change in the place's inherent 
character, and without any lessening of its tyranny 
over the surrounding country. For though Leo's 
Hill dominates no longer by means of its external 
strength, it dominates, quite as completely, by means 
of its interior riches. 

It is, in fact, a huge rock-island, washed by the 
leafy waves of the encircling valleys, and contain- 
ing, as its hid treasure, stone enough to rebuild 
Babylon. 

In that particular corner of the West Country, so 
distinct and deep-rooted are the legendary surviv- 
als, it is hard not to feel as though some vast 



LEO'S HILL 



spiritual conflict were still proceeding between the 
two opposed Mythologies — the one drawing its 
strength from the impulse to Power, and the other 
from the impulse to Sacrifice. 

A village-dweller in Nevilton might, if he were 
philosophically disposed, be just as much a percipient 
of this cosmic struggle, as if he stood between the 
Palatine and St. Peter's. 

Let him linger among the cranes and pulleys of 
this heathen promontory, and look westward to the 
shrine of the Holy Grail, or eastward to where 
rested the Holy Rood, and it would be strange if he 
did not become conscious of the presence of eternal 
spiritual antagonists, wrestling for the mastery. 

He would at any rate be made aware of the fatal 
force of Inanimate Objects over human destiny. 

There would seem to him something positively 
monstrous and sinister about the manner in which 
this brute mass of inert sandstone had possessed 
itself of the lives of the generations. It had come 
to this at last; that those who owned the Hill 
owned the dwellers beneath the Hill; and the Hill 
itself owned them that owned it. 

The name by which the thing had come to be 
known indicated sufficiently well its nature. 

Like a couchant desert-lion it overlooked its prey; 
and would continue to do so, as long as the planet 
lasted. 

Out of its inexhaustible bowels the tawny monster 
fed the cities of seven countries — cities whose halls, 
churches, theatres, and markets, mocked the caprices 
of rain and sun as obdurately as their earth-bound 
parent herself. 



WOOD AND STONE 



The sandstone of Leo's Hill remains, so architects 
tell us, the only rival of granite, as a means for the 
perpetuation of human monuments. Even granite 
wears less well than this, in respect to the assaults of 
rain and flood. The solitary mysterious monoliths 
of Stonehenge, with their unknown, alien origin, alone 
seem to surpass it in their eternal perdurance. 

As far as Nevilton itself is concerned everything in 
the place owes its persuasive texture to this resistant 
yet soft material. From the lordly Elizabethan man- 
sion to the humblest pig-stye, they all proceed from 
the entrails of Leo's Hill; and they all still wear — 
these motley whelps of the great dumb beast — its 
tawny skin, its malleable sturdiness, its enduring 
consistence. 

Who can resist a momentary wonder at the strange 
mutability of the fate that governs these things? 
The actual slabs, for example, out of which the high 
shafts and slender pinnacles of the church-tower were 
originally hewn, must once have lain in littered heaps 
for children to scramble upon, and dogs to rub 
against. And now they are the windy resting-places, 
and airy "coigns of vantage," of all the feathered 
tribes in their migrations! 

What especially separates the Stone of Leo's Hill 
from its various local rivals, is its chameleon-like 
power of taking tone and colour from every ele- 
ment it touches. While Purbeck marble, for instance, 
must always remain the same dark, opaque, slippery 
thing it was when it left its Dorset coast; while 
Portland stone can do nothing but grow gloomier 
and gloomier, in its ashen-grey moroseness, under the 
weight of the London fogs; the tawny progeny of 



LEO'S HILL 



this tyrant of the western vales becomes amber- 
streaked when it restricts the play of fountains, 
orange-tinted when it protects herbacious borders, 
and rich as a petrified sunset when it drinks the 
evening light from the mellow front of a Cathedral 
Tower. 

Apart from any geological affinity, it might almost 
seem as though this Leonian stone possessed some 
weird occult relation to those deep alluvial deposits 
which render the lanes and fields about Nevilton so 
thick with heavy earth. 

Though closer in its texture to sand than to clay, 
it is with clay that its local usage is more generally 
associated, and it is into a clay-bed that it crumbles 
at last, when the earth retakes her own. Its prevail- 
ing colour is rather the colour of clay than of sand, 
and no material that could be found could lend itself 
more congruously to the clinging consistence of a 
clay floor. 

It would be impossible to conceive of a temple of 
marble or Portland stone rising out of the embrace 
of the thick Nevilton soil. But Leonian sandstone 
seems no more than a concentrated petrifaction of 
such soil — its natural evocation, its organic expres- 
sion. The soil calls out upon it day and night with 
friendly recognition, and day and night it answers the 
call. There is thus no escape for the human victims 
of these two accomplices. In confederate reciprocity 
the stone receives them from the clay, and the clay 
receives them from the stone. They pass from homes 
built irretrievably of the one, into smaller and more 
permanent houses, dug irretrievably out of the other. 

The character of the soil in that corner of Somerset- 



6 WOOD AND STONE 

shire is marked, beyond everything else, by the cling- 
ing tenacity of its soft, damp, treacherous earth. 
It is a spot loved by the west-wind, and by the rains 
brought by the west-wind. Overshadowed by the 
lavish fertility of its abounding foliage, it never seems 
to experience enough sunshine to draw out of it the 
eternal presence of this oppressive dampness. The 
lush pastures may thicken, the rich gardens blossom, 
the ancient orchards ripen; but an enduring sense of 
something depressing and deep and treacherous lurks 
ever in the background of these pleasant things. 
Not a field but has its overshadowing trees; and not 
a tree but has its roots loosely buried in that special 
kind of soft, heavy earth, which an hour's rain can 
change into clinging mud. 

It is in the Nevilton churchyard, when a new 
grave is being dug, that this sinister peculiarity of 
the earth-floor is especially noticeable. The sight of 
those raw, rough heaps of yellow clay, tossed out 
upon grass and flowers, is enough to make the living 
shrink back in terror from the oblong hole into which 
they have consigned their dead. All human ceme- 
teries smell, like the hands of the Shakespearean king, 
of forlorn mortality; but such mortality seems more 
palpably, more oppressively emphasized among the 
graves of Nevilton than in other repositories of the 
dead. To be buried in many a burying-ground one 
knows, would be no more than a negative terror; no 
more than to be deprived, as Homer puts it, of the 
sweet privilege of the blessed air. But to be buried 
in Nevilton clay has a positive element in its dread- 
fulness. It is not so much to be buried, as to be 
sucked in, drawn down, devoured, absorbed. Never 



LEO'S HILL 



in any place does the peculiar congruity between the 
yellowness of the local clay and the yellowness of the 
local stone show so luridly as among these patient 
hillocks. 

The tombstones here do not relieve the pressure of 
fate by appealing, in marble whiteness, away from 
the anthropophagous earth, to the free clouds of 
heaven. They are of the earth, and they conspire 
with the earth. They yearn to the soil, and the soil 
yearns to them. They weigh down upon the poor 
relics consigned to their care, in a hideous partner- 
ship with the clay that is working its will upon them. 

And the rank vegetation of the place assists 
this treachery. Orange-tinted lichen and rusty-red 
weather-stains alternate with the encroachments of 
moss and weeds in reducing each separate protruding 
slab into conformity with what is about it and be- 
neath it. This churchyard, whose stone and clay 
so cunningly intermingle, is in an intimate sense the 
very navel and centre of the village. Above it rises 
the tall perpendicular tower of St. Catharine's church; 
and beyond it, on the further side of a strip of pasture 
a stagnant pond, and a solitary sycamore, stands the 
farm that is locally named "the Priory." This 
house, the most imposing of all in the village except 
the Manor, has as its immediate background the 
umbrageous conical eminence where the Holy Rood 
was found. It is a place adapted to modern usage 
from a noble fragment of monastic ruin. Here, in 
mediaeval days, rose a rich Cistercian abbey, to which, 
doubtless, the pyramidal mount, in the background, 
offered a store of consecrated legends. 

North of the churchyard, beyond the main village 



8 WOOD AND STONE 

street with its formal town-like compactness, the 
ground slopes imperceptibly up, past a few enclosed 
cottage-orchards, to where, embosomed in gracious 
trees and Italianated gardens, stands the pride and 
glory of Nevilton, its stately Elizabethan house. 

This house, founded in the reign of Henry VIII, 
synchronized in its foundation with the overthrow of 
the Cistercian Order, and was constructed entirely 
of Leonian stone, removed for the purpose of building 
it from the scene of the Priory's destruction. Twice 
over, then, in their human history, since they left 
the entrails of that brooding monster over which the 
Nevilton people see the sun set each day, had these 
carved pieces of sandstone contributed to the pride 
of the rulers of men. 

Their first use had not been attended with an 
altogether propitious destiny. How far their present 
use will prove of happier omen remains a secret of 
the adamantine Fates. The imaginary weaving of 
events, upon which we are just now engaged, may 
perhaps serve, as certain liturgical formulae of pro- 
pitiation served in former days, as a means of averting 
the wrath of the Eumenides. For though made use 
of again and again for fair and pious purposes, some- 
thing of the old heathen malignity of the Druid hill 
still seems to hang about the stone it yields; and over 
the substance of that stone's destiny the two Mythol- 
ogies still struggle; Power and Sacrifice dividing the 
living and the dead. 



CHAPTER II 
NEVILTON 

UNTIL within some twenty years of the date 
with which we are now concerned, the dis- 
tinguished family who originally received the 
monastic estates from the royal despot had held 
them intact and unassailed. By an evil chance how- 
ever, the property had extended itself, during the 
eighteenth century, so as to include the larger portion 
of Leo's Hill; and since that day its possession had 
been attended by misfortune. The ancient aboriginal 
fortress proved as fatal to its modern invaders as it 
had proved in remoter times to Roman, Saxon and 
Norman. 

A fanciful imagination might indeed have amused 
itself with the curious dream, that some weird Druidic 
curse had been laid upon that grass-grown island of 
yellow rock, bringing disaster and eclipse to all who 
meddled with it. Such an imagination would have 
been able to fortify its fancy by recalling the sugges- 
tive fact that at the bottom of the large woodland 
pond, indicated in this narrative under the name of 
Auber Lake, was discovered, not many years before, 
an immense slab of Leonian stone, inscribed with 
symbols baffling interpretation, but suggesting, to one 
antiquarian mind at least, a hint of pre-historic Devil- 
Worship. However this may be, it is certain that 
the family of Seldom found themselves finally faced 



10 WOOD AND STONE 

with the alternative of selling the place they loved or 
of seeing it lapse under their hands into confusion 
and neglect. Of these evil alternatives they chose the 
former; and thus the estates, properties, royalties, 
and appurtenances, of the historic Manor of Nevilton 
fell into the hands of a clever financier from Lombard 
Street. 

The family of Mr. Mortimer Romer had never at 
any time bowed its knee in kings' houses. Nor were 
its religious antecedents marked by orthodox reputa- 
tion. Mr. Romer was indeed in every sense of the 
word a "self-made man." But though neither Chris- 
tian nor Jew, — for his grandfather, the fish-monger 
of Soho, had been of the Unitarian persuasion — it 
cannot be denied that he possessed the art of making 
himself thoroughly respected by both the baptized 
and the circumcised. He indeed pursued his main 
purpose, which was the acquiring of power, with 
an unscrupulousness worthy of a Roman Emperor. 
Possibly it was this Roman tenacity in him, combined 
with his heathen indifference to current theology, 
which propitiated the avenging deities of Leo's Hill. 
So far at any rate he had been eminently successful 
in his speculations. He had secured complete posses- 
sion of every quarry on the formidable eminence; 
and the company of which he was both director and 
president was pursuing its activities in a hundred new 
directions. It had, in the few last years, gone so far 
as to begin certain engineering assaults upon those 
remote portions of the ancient escarpments that had 
been left untouched since the legions of Claudius 
Caesar encamped under their protection. 

The bulk of Mr. Romer's stone-works were on the 



NEVILTON 11 



Hill itself; but others, intended for the more delicate 
finishing touches, were situated in a convenient spot 
close to Nevilton Station. Out of these sheds and 
yards, built along the railway-track, arose, from 
morning to night, the monotonous, not unpleasing, 
murmur of wheels and saws and grindstones. The 
contrast between these sounds and the sylvan quiet- 
ness of the vicarage garden, which sloped down 
towards them, was one of the most significant indica- 
tions of the clash of the Two Mythologies in this 
place. The priest meditating among his roses upon 
the vanity of all but "heavenly habitations" might 
have been in danger of being too obtrusively reminded 
of the pride of the houses that are very definitely 
"made with hands." Perhaps this was one of the 
reasons why the present incumbent of Nevilton had 
preferred a more undisturbed retreat. 

The general manager of Mortimer Romer's quarries 
was a certain Mr. Lickwit, who served also as his 
confidential adviser in many other spheres. 

The works at Nevilton Station were left to the 
superintendence of two brothers named Andersen, 
skilled stone-cutters, sons of the famous Gideon 
Andersen known to architects all over the kingdom 
for his designs in Leonian stone. Both Gideon 
and his wife Naomi were buried in Nevilton church- 
yard, and the brothers were condemned in the 
village as persons of an almost scandalous piety 
because of their innocent habit of lingering on warm 
summer evenings over their parents' grave. They 
lived together, these two, as lodgers with the station- 
master, in a newly built cottage close to their work. 
Their social position in the place was a curious and 



U WOOD AND STONE 

anomalous one. Their father's reputation as a sculp- 
tor had brought him into touch with every grade of 
society; and the woman who became his wife was by 
birth what is usually termed a lady. Gideon himself 
had been a rough and gross fellow; and after his 
wife's death had hastened to take his sons away from 
school and apprentice them to his own trade. They 
were in many respects a noteworthy pair, though 
scarcely favourites, either with their fellow-workmen 
or their manager. 

James Andersen, the elder by some ten years, was 
of a morose, reserved temper, and though a capable 
workman never seemed happy in the workshop. 
Luke, on the contrary, possessed a peculiarly sunny 
and serene spirit. 

They were both striking in appearance. The 
younger approximated to that conventional type of 
beauty which is popularly known as being "like a 
Greek god." The elder, tall, swarthy, and sinister, 
suggested rather the image of some gloomy idol 
carved on the wall of an Assyrian temple. What, 
however, was much more remarkable than their 
appearance was their devoted attachment to one 
another. They lived, worked, ate, drank, walked 
and slept together. It was impossible to separate 
them. Had Mr. Lickwit dismissed James, Luke would 
immediately have thrown down his tools. Had 
Luke been the banished one, James would have 
followed him into exile. 

It had fallen to Mr. Romer, some seven years 
before our narrative begins, to appoint a new vicar 
to Nevilton; and he had appointed one of such 
fierce ascetic zeal and such pronounced socialistic 



NEVILTON 13 



sympathies, that he had done nothing since but 
vehemently and bitterly repent his choice. 

The Promotor of Companies had been betrayed 
into this blunder by the impulse of revengeful 
caprice, the only impulse in his otherwise well- 
balanced nature that might be termed dangerous to 
himself. 

He had quarrelled with the bishop over some 
matter connected with his stone-works; and in 
order to cause this distinguished prelate grief 
and annoyance he had looked about for someone 
to honour who was under the episcopal ban. The 
bishop, however, was of so discreet a temper and 
so popular in his diocese that the only rebel to his 
authority that could be discovered was one of the 
curates of a church at Yeoborough who had in- 
sisted upon preaching the Roman doctrine of Tran- 
substantiation. 

The matter would probably have lapsed into 
quiescence, save for the crafty interference in the 
local newspaper of a group of aggressive Noncon- 
formists, who took this opportunity of sowing desir- 
able dissension between the higher and lower orders 
of the hated Establishment. 

Mr. Romer, who, like Gallio, cared for none of 
these things, and was at heart a good deal worse 
than a Nonconformist, seized upon the chance 
offered by the death of Nevilton's vicar; and in- 
stalled as his successor this rebel to ecclesiastical 
authority. 

Once installed, however, the Rev. Hugh Clavering 
speedily came to an understanding with his bishop; 
compromised on the matter of preaching Transub- 



14 WOOD AND STONE 

stantiation; and apparently was allowed to go on 
believing in it. 

And it was then that the Promoter of Companies 
learned for the first time how much easier it is to 
make a priest than to unmake him. For situation 
after situation arose in which the master of the 
Leonian quarries found himself confronted by an 
alien Power — a Power that refused to worship 
Sandstone. Before this rupture, however, the young 
Priest had persuaded Mr. Romer to let him live in 
the Old Vicarage, a small but cheerful house just 
opposite the church door. The orthodox vicarage, 
a rambling Early Victorian structure standing in 
its own grounds at the end of the West Drive, 
was let — once more at the Priest's suggestion — to 
the last living representatives of the dispossessed 
Seldoms. 

It indicated a good deal of spirit on the part of 
Valentia Seldom and her daughter thus to return to 
the home of their ancestors. 

Mrs. Seldom was a cousin of the man who had 
sold the estate. Her daughter Vennie, brought up 
in a school at Florence, had never seen Nevilton, 
and it was with the idea of taking advantage for the 
girl's sake of their old prestige in that corner of 
England that Valentia accepted Mr. Romer's offer 
and became the vicarage tenant. 

The quarry-owner himself was influenced in carry- 
ing through this affair, by his anxiety, for the sake 
of his daughter, to secure a firmer footing with the 
aristocracy of the neighborhood. Here again, how- 
ever, he was destined to disappointment: for once 
in possession of her twenty years' lease the old lady 



NEVILTON 15 



showed not the least intention of letting herself be 
used as a social stepping-stone. 

She had, indeed, under her own roof, cause enough 
for preoccupation and concern. 

Her daughter — a little ghost-moth of a girl, of 
fragile delicacy — seemed entirely devoid of that 
mysterious magnetic attraction which lures to the 
side of most virgins the devotion of the opposite 
sex. She appeared perfectly content to remain for- 
ever in her tender maidenhood, and refused to exert 
the slightest effort to be "nice" to the charming 
young people her mother threw in her way. She 
belonged to that class of young girls who seem to 
be set apart by nature for other purposes than those 
of the propagation of the race. 

Her wistful spirit, shrinking into itself like the 
leaves of a sensitive plant at the least approach of 
a rough hand, responded only to one passionate 
impulse, the impulse of religion. 

She grew indeed so estranged from the normal 
world, that it was not only Valentia who concealed 
the thought that when she left the earth the ancient 
race of Seldoms would leave it with her. 

Nor was it only in regard to her child's religious 
obsession that the lady suffered. She had flatly 
refused to let her enter into anything but the cold- 
est relations with "those dreadful people at the 
House"; and it was with a peculiar shock of dismay 
that she found that the girl was not literally obeying 
her. It was not, however, to the Romers themselves 
that Vennie made her shy overtures, but to a luck- 
less little relative of that family now domiciled with 
them as companion to Gladys Romer. 



16 WOOD AND STONE 

This young dependent, reputed in the village to 
be of Italian origin, struck the gentle heart of the 
last of the Seldoms with indescribable pity. She 
could not altogether define the impression the girl 
produced upon her, but it was a singularly oppres- 
sive one, and it vexed and troubled her. 

The situation was wretchedly complicated. It was 
extremely difficult to get a word with the little com- 
panion without encountering Gladys; and any ap- 
proach to intimacy with "the Romer girl" would 
have meant an impossible scene with Mrs. Seldom. 
Nor was it a light undertaking, in such hurried 
interviews as she did manage to secure, to induce 
the child to drop her reserve. She would fix her 
great brown foreign eyes — her name was Lacrima 
Traffio — on Vennie's face, and make curious little 
helpless gestures with her hands when questions 
were asked her; but speak of herself she would not. 

It was clear she was absolutely dependent on her 
cousins. Vennie gathered as much as that, as she 
once talked with her under the church wall, when 
Gladys was chatting with the vicar. A reference to 
her own people had nearly resulted in an outburst 
of tears. Vennie had had to be content with a 
broken whisper: "We come from Rapallo — they 
are all dead." There was nothing, it appeared, that 
could be added to this. 

It was perhaps a little inconsistent in the old lady 
to be so resolute against her daughter's overtures to 
Lacrima, as she herself had no hesitation in making 
a sort of protege of another of Mr. Romer's tribe. 

This was an eccentric middle-aged bachelor who 
had drifted into the place soon after the newcomer's 



NEVILTON 17 



arrival and had established himself in a dilapidated 
cottage on the outskirts of the Auber woods. 

Remotely related to Mrs. Romer, he had in some 
way become dependent on her husband, whose finan- 
cial advantage over him was not, it seemed, as time 
went on, exerted in a very considerate manner. 

Maurice Quincunx, for such was his unusual name, 
was an illegitimate descendant of one of the most 
historic houses in the neighborhood, but both his 
poverty and his opinions caused him to live what 
was practically the life of a hermit, and made him 
shrink away, even more nervously than little Vennie 
Seldom, from any intercourse with his equals. 

The present possessors of his queer ancient name 
were now the Lords of Glastonbury, and had prob- 
ably never so much as heard of Maurice's existence. 

He would come by stealth to pay Valentia visits, 
preferring the evening hours when in the summer 
she used to sit with her work, on a terrace over- 
looking a sloping orchard, and watch Vennie water 
her roses. 

The vicarage terrace was a place of extraordinary 
quiet and peace, eminently adapted to the low-voiced, 
nervous ramblings of a recluse of Maurice Quincunx's 
timidity. 

The old' lady by degrees quite won this eccentric's 
heart; and the queerly assorted friends would pace 
up and down for hours in the cool of the evening 
talking of things in no way connected either with 
Mr. Romer or the Church — the two subjects about 
which Mr. Quincunx held dangerously strong views. 

Apart from this quaint outcast and the youthful 
parson, Mrs. Seldom's only other intimate in the 



18 WOOD AND STONE 

place was a certain John Francis Taxater, a gentle- 
man of independent means, living by himself with 
an old housekeeper in a cottage called The Gables, 
situated about half-way between the vicarage and 
the village. 

Mr. Taxater was a Catholic and also a philosopher; 
these two peculiarities affording the solution to what 
otherwise would have been an insoluble psychic 
riddle. Even as it was, Mr. Taxater's mind was of 
so subtle and complicated an order, that he was at 
once the attraction and the despair of all the re- 
ligious thinkers of that epoch. For it must be 
understood that though quietly resident under the 
shadow of Nevilton Mount, the least essay from Mr. 
Taxater's pen was eagerly perused by persons inter- 
ested in religious controversy in all the countries of 
Europe. 

He wrote for philosophical journals in London, 
Paris, Rome and New York; and there often ap- 
peared at The Gables most surprising visitors 
from Germany and Italy and Spain. 

He had a powerful following among the more 
subtle-minded of the Catholics of England; and was 
highly respected by important personages in the social, 
as well as the literary circles, of Catholic society. 

The profundity of his mind may be gauged from 
the fact that he was able to steer his way success- 
fully through the perilous reefs of "modernistic" 
discussion, without either committing himself to he- 
retical doctrine or being accused of reactionary ultra- 
montanism. 

Mr. Taxater's written works were, however, but 
a trifling portion of his personality. His intellectual 



NEVILTON 19 



interests were as rich and varied as those of some 
great humanist of the Italian Renaissance, and his 
personal habits were as involved and original as his 
thoughts were complicated and deep. 

He was perpetually engaged in converting the 
philosopher in him to Catholicism, and the Catholic 
in him to philosophy — yet he never permitted either 
of these obsessions to interfere with his enjoyment 
of life. 

Luke Andersen, who was perhaps of all the inhabi- 
tants of Nevilton most conscious of the drama 
played around him, used to maintain that it was 
impossible to tell in the last resort whether Mr. 
Taxater's place was with the adherents of Christ or 
with the adherents of Anti-Christ. Like his proto- 
type, the evasive Erasmus, he seemed able to be on 
both sides at the same time. 

Perhaps it was a secret consciousness of the singu- 
lar position of Nevilton, planted, as it were, between 
two streams of opposing legend, that originally led 
Mr. Taxater to take up his abode in so secluded 
a spot. 

It is impossible to tell. In this as in all other 
transactions of his life he combined an unworldly 
simplicity with a Machiavellian astuteness. If the 
Day of Judgment revealed him as being on the side 
of the angels, it might also reveal him as having 
exercised, in the microcosmic Nevilton drama, as 
well as in his wider sphere, one of the most subtle 
influences against the Powers of Darkness that those 
Powers ever encountered in their invisible activity. 

At the moment when the present narrative takes 
up the woven threads of these various persons' lives 



20 WOOD AND STONE 

there seemed every prospect that in external nature 
at least there was going to be an auspicious and 
halcyon season. June had opened with abnormal 
pleasantness. Exquisite odours were in the air, 
wafted from woods and fields and gardens. White 
dust, alternating with tender spots of coolness where 
the shadows of trees fell, lent the roads in the 
vicinity that leisured gala-day expectancy which 
one notes in the roads of France and Spain, but 
which is so rare in England. 

It seemed almost as though the damp sub-soil 
of the place had relaxed its malign influence; as 
though the yellow clay in the churchyard had 
ceased its calling for victims; and as though the 
brooding monster in the sunset, from which every 
day half the men of the village returned with their 
spades and picks, had put aside, as irrelevant to a 
new and kindlier epoch, its ancient hostility to the 
Christian dwellers in that quiet valley. 



CHAPTER III 
OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY 

THE depths of Mr. Romer's mind, as he paced 
up and down the Leonian pavement under the 
east front of his house on one of the early days 
of this propitious June, were seething with predatory 
projects. The last of the independent quarries on the 
Hill had just fallen into his hands after a legal process 
of more than usual chicanery, conducted in person 
by the invaluable Mr. Lickwit. 

He was now occupied in pushing through Parlia- 
ment a bill for the reduction of railway freight 
charges, so that the expense of carrying his stone to 
its various destinations might be materially reduced. 
But it was not only of financial power that he thought 
as the smell of the roses from the sun-baked walls 
floated in upon him across the garden. 

The man's commercial preoccupations had not by 
any means, as so often happens, led to the atrophy 
of his more personal instincts. 

His erotic appetite, for instance, remained as 
insatiable as ever. Age did not dull, nor finance 
wither, that primordial craving. The aphrodisiac in- 
stincts in Mortimer Romer were, however, much less 
simple than might be supposed. 

In this hyper-sensual region he had more claim 
to artistic subtlety than his enemies realized. He 
rarely allowed himself the direct expansion of frank 



22 WOOD AND STONE 

and downright lasciviousness. His little pleasures 
were indirect, elaborate, far-fetched. 

He afforded really the interesting spectacle of 
one whose mind was normal, energetic, dynamic; 
but whose senses were slow, complicated, fastidious. 
He was a formidable forward-marching machine, with 
a heart of elaborate perversity. He was a thick- 
skinned philistine with the sensuality of a sybarite. 

I do not mean to imply that there was any lack 
of rapacity in the senses of Mr. Romer. His senses 
were indeed unfathomable in their devouring depths. 
But they were liable to fantastic caprices. They 
were not the simple animal senses of a Gothic bar- 
barian. They assumed imperial contortions. 

The main eccentricity of the erotic tendencies of 
this remarkable man lay in the elaborate pleasure he 
derived from his sense of power. The actual lure of 
the flesh had little attraction for him. What pleased 
him was a slow tightening of his grip upon people — 
upon their wills, their freedom, their personality. 

Any impression a person might make upon Mr. 
Romer's senses was at once transformed into a 
desire to have that person absolutely at his mercy. 
The thought that he held such a one reduced to 
complete spiritual helplessness alone satisfied him. 

The first time he had encountered Lacrima Traffio 
he had been struck by her appealing eyes, her fragile 
figure, her frightened gestures. Deep in his perverted 
heart he had desired her; but his desire, under the 
psychic law I have endeavoured to explain, quickly 
resolved itself into a resolution to take possession 
of her, not as his mistress, but as his slave. 

Nor did the subtle elaboration of his perversity 



OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY 23 

stop there. It were easy and superficial to dominate 
in his own person so helpless a dependent. What 
was less easy was to reduce her to submission to 
the despotic caprices of his daughter, a girl only a 
few years older than herself. 

The enjoyment of a sense of vicarious power was 
a satisfaction curiously provocative to his predatory 
craving. Nor did subtlety of the situation stop at 
that point. It was not only necessary that the girl 
who attracted him should be at his daughter's 
mercy; it was necessary that his daughter should 
not be unconscious of the role she herself played. 
It was necessary that they should be in a sense 
confederates in this game of cat-and-mouse. 

As Mr. Romer paced the terrace of his imposing 
mansion a yet profounder triumph presented itself 
in the recesses of his imperial nature. 

He had lately introduced into his "entourage" a 
certain brother-in-law of his, the widower of his 
sister, a man named John Goring. This individual 
was of a much simpler, grosser type than the recon- 
dite quarry-owner. He was, indeed, no more than 
a narrow-minded, insolent, avaricious animal. He 
lacked even the superficial gentility of his formidable 
relation. Nor had his concentrated but unintelligent 
avarice brought him, so far, any great wealth. He 
still remained, in spite of Romer's help, what he 
had been born, an English farmer of unpropitiating 
manners and supernal greed. 

The Promoter of Companies was, however, not 
unaware, any more than was Augustus Caesar, of 
the advantage accruing to a despot from the posses- 
sion of devoted, if unattractive, tools; and contemp- 



24 WOOD AND STONE 

tuously risking the shock to his social prestige of 
such an apparition in the neighborhood, he had 
secured Mr. Goring as a permanent tenant of the 
largest farm on his estate. This was no other than 
the Priory Farm, with its gentle monastic memories. 
What the last Prior of Nevilton would have thought 
could he have left his grave under St. Catherine's 
altar and reappeared among his dovecotes it is 
distressing to surmise. He would doubtless have 
drawn from the sight of John Goring a profoundly 
edifying moral as to the results of royal inter- 
ference with Christ's Holy Church. Nor is it likely 
that an encounter with Mr. Romer himself would 
have caused less astonishment to his mediaeval 
spirit. He would, indeed, have recognized that what 
is now called Progress is no mere scientific phrase; 
but a most devastating reality. He would have 
found that Nevilton had "progressed" very far. He 
would have believed that the queer stone-devils that 
his monks had carved, half emerging from the eaves 
of the church-roof, had got quite loose and gone 
abroad among men. Had he probed, in the manner 
of clairvoyant saints, the troubled recesses of Mr. 
Romer's mind as that gentleman inhaled the sweet 
noon air, he would have cried aloud his indignation 
and made the sign of the cross as if over a mortuary 
of spiritual decomposition. 

For as the mid-day sun of that hot June morning 
culminated, and the clear hard shadows fell, sharp 
and thin, upon the orange-tinted pavement, it en- 
tered Mr. Romer's head that he might make a more 
personal use of his farmer-brother than had until 
now been possible. 



OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY 25 

With this idea in his brain he entered the house 
and sought his wife in her accustomed place at the 
corner of the large reception-hall. He sat down 
forthright by the side of her mahogany table and 
lit a cigar. As Mr. Romer was the species of male 
animal that might be written down in the guide- 
book of some Martian visitor as "the cigar-smoking 
variety" his wife would have taken her place among 
"the sedentary knitting ones." 

She was a large, fair, plump, woman, as smooth 
and pallid as her husband was grizzled and ruddy. 
Her obsequious deference to her lord's views was only 
surpassed by her lethargic animal indolence. She 
was like a great, tame, overgrown, white-skinned 
Puma. Her eyes had the greenish tint of feline eyes, 
and something of their daylight contraction. Her 
use of spectacles did not modify this tendency, but 
rather increased it; for the effect of the round glass 
orbs pushed up upon her forehead was to enhance 
the malicious gleam of the little narrow-lidded slits 
that peered out beneath them. 

It may be imagined with what weary and ironical 
detachment the solemn historic portraits of the ancient 
Seldoms — for the pictures and furniture had been 
sold with the house — looked out from their gilded 
frames upon these ambiguous intruders. But neither 
husband nor wife felt the least touch of "compunctu- 
ous visiting" as they made themselves at ease under 
that immense contempt. 

"I have been thinking," said Mr. Romer, puffing 
a thick cloud of defiant smoke into the air, so that 
it went sailing up to the very feet of a delicate 
Reynolds portrait; "I have been thinking that I am 



26 WOOD AND STONE 

really quite unjustified in going on with that allow- 
ance to Quincunx. He ought to realize that he has 
completely exhausted the money your aunt left him. 
He ought to face the situation, instead of quietly 
accepting our gift as if it were his right. And they 
tell me he does not even keep a civil tongue in his 
head. Lickwit was only complaining the other day 
about his tampering with our workmen. He has 
been going about for some time with those damned 
Andersen fellows, and no doubt encouraging them in 
their confounded impertinence. 

I don't like the man, my dear; — that is the plain 
truth. I have never liked him; and he has certainly 
never even attempted to conceal his dislike of me. 

"He is very polite to your face, Mortimer," mur- 
mured the lady. 

"Exactly," Mr. Romer rejoined, "to my face he is 
more than polite. He is obsequious; he is cringing. 
But behind my back — damn him! — the rascal is 
a rattlesnake." 

"Well, dear, no doubt it has all worked out for 
the best"; purred the plump woman, softly counting 
the threads of her knitting. "You were in need of 
Aunt's money at the time — in great need of it." 

"I know I was," replied the Promoter of Com- 
panies, "I know I was; and he knows I was. That 
is why I have been giving him six per cent on what 
he lent me. But the fellow has had more than 
that. He has had more by this time than the whole 
original sum; and I tell you, Susan, it's got to end; 
— its got to end here, now, and forever!" 

Mr. Romer's cigar-smoke had now floated up above 
the feet of the Reynolds Portrait and was invading 



OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY 27 

its gentle and melancholy face. It was a portrait 
of a young girl in the court-dress of the time, but 
with such pathetic nun-like features that it was 
clear that little Vennie was not the only one of her 
race to have grown weary of this rough world. 

"It is a providential thing, dear," whispered the 
knitting female, "that there were no horrid docu- 
ments drawn up about that money. Maurice cannot 
impose upon us in that way." 

"He is doing worse," answered her husband. "He 
is imposing upon us on the strength of a disgusting 
sort of sickly sentiment. He has had all his money 
back and more; and he knows he has. But he wants 
to go on living on my money while he abuses me 
on every occasion. Do you know, he even preaches 
in that confounded social meeting? I shall have that 
affair put a stop to, one of these days. It is only an 
excuse for spreading dissatisfaction in the village. 
Lickwit has complained to me about it more than 
once. He says that Socialistic scoundrel Wone is 
simply using the meeting to canvass for his election. 
You know he is going to stand, in place of Sir 
Herbert Ratcliffe? What the Liberal Party is doing 
I cannot conceive — pandering to these slimy wind- 
bags! And your blessed relation backs him up. The 
thing is monstrous, outrageous! Here am I, allowing 
this fellow a hundred a year to live in idleness; and 
he is plotting against me at my very doorstep." 

"Perhaps he does not know that the Conservative 
member is going to retire in your favour," insinuated 
the lady. 

"Know? Of course he knows! All the village 
knows. All the country knows. You can never hide 



28 WOOD AND STONE 

things of that kind. He knows, and he is deliber- 
ately working against me." 

"It would be nice if he could get a place as a 
clerk," suggested Mr. Quincunx's relative, pensively. 
"It certainly does not seem fair that you, who work 
so hard for the money you make, should support him 
in complete idleness." 

Mr. Romer looked at her thoughtfully, knocking 
the ashes from his cigar. "I believe you have hit 
it there, my dear," he said. Then he smiled in a 
manner peculiarly malignant. "Yes, it would be very 
nice if he could get a place as a clerk — a place 
where he would have plenty of simple office work — 
a place where he would be kept to his desk, and not 
allowed to roam the country corrupting honest work- 
men. Yes, you are quite right, Susan; a clerk's 
place is what this Quincunx wants. And, by Heaven, 
what he shall have! I'll bring the affair to a head 
at once. I'll put it to him that your aunt's money is 
at an end, and that I have already paid him back 
in full all that he lent me. I'll put it to him that 
he is now in my debt. In fact, that he is now 
entirely dependent on me to the tune of a hundred 
a year. And I'll explain to him that he must either 
go out into the world and shift for himself, as better 
men than he have had to do, or enter Lickwit's 
office, either in Yeoborough or on the Hill." 

"He will enter the office, Mortimer," murmured 
the lady; "he will enter the office. Maurice is not 
the man to emigrate, or do anything of that kind. 
Besides he has a reason" — here her voice became 
so extremely mellifluous that it might almost be 
said to have liquefied — "to stay in Nevilton." 



OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY 29 



"What's this?" cried Romer, getting up and throw- 
ing his cigar out of the window. "You don't mean 
to tell me — eh? — that this scarecrow is in love 
with Gladys?" 

The lady purred softly and replaced her spectacles. 
"Oh dear no! What an idea! Oh certainly, certainly 
not! But Gladys, you know, is not the only girl in 
Nevilton." 

"Who the devil is it then? Not Vennie Seldom, 
surely?" 

" Look nearer, Mortimer, look nearer " ; murmured 
the lady with sibilant sweetness. 

"Not Lacrimal You don't mean to say — " 

"Why, dear, you needn't be so surprised. You 
look more angry than if it had been Gladys herself. 
Yes, of course it is Lacrima. Hadn't you observed 
it? But you dear men are so stupid, aren't you, in 
these things?" 

Mrs. Romer rubbed one white hand over the 
other; and beamed upon her husband through her 
spectacles. 

Mr. Romer frowned. "But the Traffio girl is so, 
so — you know what I mean." 

"So quiet and unimpressionable. Ah! my dear, 
it is just these quiet girls who are the very ones to 
be enjoying themselves on the sly." 

"How far has this thing gone, Susan?" 

"Oh you needn't get excited, Mortimer. It has not 
really 'gone' anywhere. It has hardly begun. In 
fact I have not the least authority for saying that 
she cares for him at all. I think she does a little, 
though. I think she does. But one never can tell. 
I can, however, give you my word that he cares for 



30 WOOD AND STONE 

her. And that is what we were talking about, weren't 
we?" 

"I shall pack him off to my office in London," 
said Mr. Romer. 

"He wouldn't go, my dear. I tell you he wouldn't 
go." 

"But he can't live on nothing." 

"He can. He will. Sooner than leave Nevilton 
Maurice would eat grass. He would become lay- 
reader or something. He would sponge on Mrs. 
Seldom." 

"Well, then he shall walk to Yeoborough and 
back every day. That will cool his blood for him." 

"That will do him a great deal of good, dear; a 
great deal of good. Auntie always used to say that 
Maurice ought to take more exercise." 

"Lickwit will exercise him! Make no mistake about 
that." 

"How you do look round you, dear, in all these 
things! How impossible it is for anyone to fool you, 
Mortimer!" 

As Mrs. Romer uttered these words she glanced 
up at the Reynolds portrait above their heads, as 
if half-suspecting that such fawning flattery would 
bring down the mockery of the little Lady-in- 
Waiting. 

"I can't help thinking Lacrima would make a very 
good wife to some hard-working sensible man," 
Mr. Romer remarked. 

His lady looked a little puzzled. "It would be 
difficult to find so suitable a companion for Gladys," 
she said. 

"Oh, of course I don't mean till Gladys is married," 



OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY 31 

said the quarry-owner quickly. "By the way, when 
is she going to accept that young fool of an 
Ilminster?" 

"All in good time, my dear, all in good time," 
purred his wife. "He has not proposed to her yet." 

"It's very curious," remarked Mr. Romer pensively, 
"that a young man of such high connections should 
wish to marry our daughter." 

"What things you say, Mortimer! Isn't Gladys 
going to inherit all this property? Don't you sup- 
pose that a younger son of Lord Tintinhull would 
jump at the idea of being master of this house?" 

"He won't be master of it while I live," said Mr. 
Romer grimly. 

"In my opinion he never will be"; added the lady. 
"I don't think Gladys really intends to accept him." 

"She'll marry somebody, I hope?" said the master 
sharply. 

"O yes she'll marry, soon enough. Only it'll be a 
cleverer man, and a richer man, than young Ilminster." 

"Have you any other pleasant little romance to 
fling at me?" 

"0 no. But I know what our dear Gladys is. I 
know what she is looking out for." 

"When she does marry," said Mr. Romer, "we 
shall have to think seriously what is to become of 
Lacrima. Look here, my dear," — it was wonderful, 
the pleasant ejaculatory manner in which this flash 
of inspiration was thrown out, — " why not marry 
her to John? She would be just the person for a 
farmer's wife." 

Mrs. Romer, to do her justice, showed signs of 
being a little shocked at this proposal. 



32 WOOD AND STONE 

"But John," — she stammered; — "John — is not 
— exactly — a marrying person, is he?" 

"He is — what I wish him to be"; was her hus- 
band's haughty answer. 

"Oh well, of course, dear, it's as you think best. 
Certainly " — the good woman could not resist this 
little thrust — "its John's only chance of marrying 
a lady. For Lacrima is that — with all her faults." 

"I shall talk to John about it"; said the Promoter 
of Companies. Feline thing though she was, Susan 
Romer could not refrain from certain inward qualms 
when she thought of the fragile hyper-sensitive Italian 
in the embraces of John Goring. What on earth set 
her husband dreaming of such a thing? But he was 
subject to strange caprices now and then; and it was 
more dangerous to balk him in these things than in his 
most elaborate financial plots. She had found that 
out already. So, on the present occasion, she made 
no further remark, than a reiterated — "How you do 
look all round you, Mortimer! It is not easy for 
anyone to fool you" 

She rose from her seat and collected her knitting. 
"I must go and see where Gladys is," she said. 

Mr. Romer followed her to the door, and went out 
again upon the terrace. The little nun-like Lady-in- 
Waiting looked steadily out across the room, her 
pinched attenuated features expressing nothing but 
patient weariness of all the ways of this mortal world. 



CHAPTER IV 

REPRISALS FROM BELOW 

IT was approaching the moment consecrated to 
the close of the day's labour in the stone- 
works by Nevilton railway-station. The sky was 
cloudless; the air windless. It was one of those 
magical arrests of the gliding feet of time, which 
afternoons in June sometimes bring with them, hold- 
ing back, as it were, all living processes of life, in 
sweet and lingering suspense. The steel tracks of the 
railway-line glittered in the sun. In the fields, that 
sloped away beyond them, the browsing cattle wore 
that unruffled air of abysmal indifference, which seems 
to make one day in their sight to be as a thousand 
years. To these placid earth-children, drawing the 
centuries together in solemn continuity, the tribes of 
men and their turbulent drama were but as vapours 
that came and went. The high elms in the hedges 
had already assumed that dark monotonous foliage 
which gives to their patient stillness on such a day 
an atmosphere of monumental expectancy. A flock 
of newly-sheared sheep, clean and shining in the hot 
sun, drifted in crowded procession down the narrow 
road, leaving a cloud of white dust behind them that 
remained stationary in the air long after they had 
passed. In the open stone-yard close to the road the 
brothers Andersen were working together, chipping 
and hammering with bare arms at an enormous Leo- 



34 WOOD AND STONE 

nian slab, carving its edges into delicate mouldings. 
The younger of the two wore no hat, and his closely 
clipped fair curls and loose shirt open at the throat, 
lent him, as he moved about his work with easy 
gestures, a grace and charm well adapted to that 
auspicious hour. 

A more sombre form by his brother's side, his broad 
brimmed hat low down over his forehead, the elder 
Andersen went on with his carving, in imperturbable 
morose absorption. 

Watching them with languid interest, their arms 
linked together, stood the figures of two girls. The 
yellow dust from the sandstone rose intermittently 
into the air, mingling with the white dust from the 
road and settling, as it sank earthward, upon the 
leaves of the yet unbudded knapweed and scabious 
which grew in the thin dusty grass. 

Between Gladys and her cousin — for the girls had 
wandered as far as this in search of distraction after 
their lazy tea on the great lawn — a curious contrast 
was now displayed. 

Gladys, with slow provocative interest, was intent 
on every movement of Luke's graceful figure. La- 
crimal attention wandered wistfully away, to the 
cattle and the orchards, and then to the sheep, which 
now were being penned in a low line of spacious 
railway trucks. 

Luke himself was by no means unaware of the 
condescending interest of his master's daughter. He 
paused in his work once or twice. He turned up his 
shirt-sleeves still higher. He bent down, to blow 
away the dust from the moulding he had made. 
Something very like a flash of amorous admiration 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 35 

passed across his blue eyes as he permitted them slyly 
to wander from Gladys' head to her waist, and from 
her waist to her shoes. She certainly was an alluring 
figure as she stood there in her thin white dress. The 
hand which pulled her skirt away from the dust 
showed as soft and warm as if it were pleading for a 
caress, and the rounded contours of her bosom looked 
as if they had ripened with the early peaches, under 
the walls of her stately garden. She presently un- 
linked her arm from her companion's, and sliding it 
softly round Lacrima's side drew the girl close against 
her. As she did this she permitted a slow amorous 
glance of deliberate tantalization to play upon the 
young carver. How well Luke Andersen knew that 
especial device of maidens when they are together — 
that way they have of making their playful, innocent 
caresses such a teasing incentive! And Luke knew 
well how to answer all this. Nothing could have 
surpassed in subtle diplomacy the manner in which 
he responded, without responding, to the amorous 
girl's overtures. He let her realize that he himself 
understood precisely the limits of the situation; that 
she was perfectly at liberty to enter a mock-flirtation 
with him, without the remotest risk of any "faux 
pas" on his part spoiling the delicacy of their relations. 
What was indeed obvious to her, without the neces- 
sity of any such unspoken protestation, was the fact 
that he found her eminently desirable. Nor did her 
pride as "the girl up at the house" quarrel with her 
vanity as the simple object of Luke's admiration. 
She wanted him to desire her as a girl; — to desire 
her to madness. And then she wanted to flout him, 
with her pretensions as a lady. This particular 



36 WOOD AND STONE 

occasion was by no means the first time she had 
drifted casually down the vicarage hill and lingered 
beside the stone-cutters. It was, however, an epoch 
in their curious relations. For the first time since 
she had been attracted to him, she deliberately moved 
close up to the stone he worked at, and entered into 
conversation. While this occurred, Lacrima, released 
from her role as the accomplice of amorous teasing, 
wandered away, picking listlessly the first red pop- 
pies of the year, which though less flaunting in 
their bold splendour than those of her childhood's 
memories, were at least the same immortal classical 
flowers. 

As she bent down in this assuaging pastime, letting 
her thoughts wander so far from Nevilton and its 
tyrants, Lacrima became suddenly conscious that 
James Andersen had laid down his tools, resumed his 
coat, and was standing by her side. 

"A beautiful evening, Miss"; he said respectfully, 
holding his hat in his hand and regarding her with 
grave gentleness. 

"Yes, isn't it?" she answered at once; and then 
was silent; while a sigh she could not suppress rose 
from the depths of her heart. For her thoughts 
reverted to another fair evening, in the days when 
England was no more than a name; and a sudden 
overpowering longing for kind voices, and the shadows 
of olives on warm hill-sides, rushed, like a wave, over 
her. 

"This must be near the Angelus-hour," she thought; 
and somehow the dark grave eyes of the man be- 
side her and his swarthy complexion made her think 
of those familiar forms that used to pass driving 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 37 

their goats before them up the rocky paths of the 
Apennine range. 

"You are unhappy, Miss," said James in a low 
voice; and these words, the only ones of genuine 
personal tenderness, except for poor Maurice's, that 
had struck her sense for the last twelve months, 
brought tears to her eyes. Vennie Seldom had 
spoken kindly to her; but — God knows — there is a 
difference between the kindness even of the gentlest 
saint and this direct spontaneous outflow of one 
heart to another. She smiled; a little mournful smile. 

"Yes; I was thinking of my own country," she 
murmured. 

"You are an Italian, Miss; I know it"; continued 
Andersen, instinctively leading her further away from 
the two golden heads that now were bending so close 
together over the Leonian stone. 

"I often think of Italy," he went on; "I think I 
should be at home in Italy. I love everything I hear 
of it, everything I read of it. It comes from my 
mother, this feeling. She was a lady, you know Miss, 
as well born as any and with a passionate love of 
books. She used to read Dante in that little 'Tem- 
ple' Series, which perhaps you have seen, with the 
Italian on one side and the English on the other. I 
never look at that book without thinking of her." 

"You have many books yourself, I expect, — Mr. — 
Andersen. You see I know your name." And 
Lacrima smiled, the first perfectly happy smile she 
had been betrayed into for many months. 

"It is not a very nice name," said James, a little 
plaintively. I wish I had a name like yours Miss — 
Traffio." 



38 WOOD AND STONE 

"Why, I think yours is quite as nice," she answered 
gravely. "It makes me think of the man who wrote 
the fairy stories." 

James Andersen frowned, "I don't like fairy 
stories," he said almost gruffly. "They tease and fret 
me. I like Thomas Hardy's books. Do you know 
Thomas Hardy?" Lacrima made a little involuntary 
gesture of depreciation. As a matter of fact her 
reading, until very lately, had been as conventual as 
that of a young nun. Vennie Seldom or the demure 
Reynolds girl could not have been more innocent of 
the darker side of literature. Hardy's books she had 
seen in the hands of Gladys, and the association 
repelled her. Pathetically anxious to brush away this 
little cloud, she began hurriedly talking to her new 
friend of Italy; of its cities, its sea-coasts, its mon- 
asteries, its churches. James Andersen listened with 
reverential attention, every now and then asking a 
question which showed how deeply his mother's love 
of the classical country had sunk into his nature. 

By this time they had wandered along the road as 
far as a little stone bridge with low parapets which 
crosses there a muddy Somersetshire stream. From 
this point the road rises quite steeply to the beginning 
of the vicarage garden. Leaning against the parapet 
of the little bridge, and looking back, they saw to 
their surprise that Gladys and Luke had not only not 
followed them but had completely disappeared. 

The last of the unskilled workmen from the sheds, 
trailing up the road together laughing and chatting, 
turned when they passed, and gazed back, as our 
two companions were doing, at the work-shops 
they had left, acknowledging Lacrima's gentle "good- 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 39 

night" with a rather shifty salutation. — This girl 
was after all only a dependent like themselves. — 
They had hardly gone many steps before they burst 
into a loud rough guffaw of rustic impertinence. 

Lacrima struck the ground nervously with her 
parasol. "What has happened?" she asked; "where 
has Gladys gone?" 

James Andersen shrugged his shoulders, "I expect 
they have wandered into the shed," he rejoined, "to 
look at my brother's work there." 

She glance^ nervously up and down the road; 
gave a quaint little sigh and made an expressive 
gesture with her hands as if disclaiming all responsi- 
bility for her cousin's doings. Then, quite suddenly, 
she smiled at Andersen with a delicious childish smile 
that transfigured her face. 

"Well, I am glad I am not left alone at any rate," 
she said. 

"I have a presentiment," the stone-cutter an- 
swered, "that this is not the last time you will be 
thrown upon my poor company." 

The girl blushed, and smiled confidingly. Her 
manner was the manner of a child, who has at last 
found a safe protector. Then all of a sudden she 
became very grave. "I hope," she said, "that you 
are one of the people who are kind to Mr. Quincunx. 
He is a great friend of mine." 

Never had the melancholy intimation, that one 
could not hope to hold anything but the second place 
in a woman's heart, been more tenderly or more 
directly conveyed! 

James Andersen bowed his head. 

"Mr. Quincunx has always been very kind to me" 



40 WOOD AND STONE 

he said, "and certainly, after what you say, I shall 
do all in my power to help him. But I can do very 
little. I believe Mrs. Seldom understands him better 
than anyone else." 

He had hardly finished speaking when the figures 
of two men made themselves visible opposite the 
back entrance of the vicarage. They were leisurely 
strolling down the road, and every now and then they 
would pause, as if the interest of their conversation 
was more than the interest of the way. 

"Why! There is Mr. Quincunx," cried the Italian; 
and she made an instinctive movement as if to put a 
little further space between herself and her companion. 
"Who is that person with him?" she added. 

"It looks like George Wone," answered the stone- 
cutter. "Yes, it is George; and he is talking as 
usual at the top of his voice. You'd suppose he 
wanted to be heard by all Nevilton." 

Lacrima hesitated and looked very embarrassed. 
She evidently did not know whether to advance in 
the direction of the newcomers or to remain where 
she was. Andersen came to her rescue. 

"Perhaps," said he, "it would be better if I went 
back and told Miss Romer you are waiting for her." 
Lacrima gave him a quick glance of responsive 
gratitude. 

"O, that would be really kind of you, Mr. Ander- 
sen," she said. 

The moment he had gone, however, she felt an- 
noyed that she had let him go. It looked so odd, she 
thought, his leaving her so suddenly, directly Maurice 
came on the scene. Besides, what would Gladys say 
at this interruption of her pleasure? She would 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 41 

suppose she had done it out of pure spitefulness! 
The moments seemed very long to her as she waited 
at the little bridge, tracing indecipherable hiero- 
glyphics in the dust with the end of her parasol. 
She kept her eyes steadily fixed on the tall retreating 
figure of the stone-cutter as he slouched with his long 
shambling stride towards the work-shop. The two 
men were not, however, really long in approaching. 
Maurice had seen her from the beginning, and his 
replies to Mr. Wone's oratory had grown propor- 
tionally brief. 

When they reached her, the girl shook hands with 
Maurice and bowed rather coldly to Mr. Wone. 
That gentleman was not however in the least quelled 
or suppressed. It was one of his most marked 
characteristics to have absolutely no consciousness of 
season or situation. When less clever people would 
have wished the earth to swallow them up, Mr. Wone 
remained imperviously self-satisfied. Having ex- 
changed greetings, Lacrima hastened to explain that 
she was waiting at this spot till Miss Romer should 
rejoin her. "Luke Andersen is showing her his 
work," she said, "and James has gone to tell her I am 
waiting." 

Mr. Wone became voluble at this. "It is a shame 
to keep a young lady like yourself waiting in the 
middle of the road." He turned to Mr. Quincunx. 
"We must not say all we think, must we? But 
begging this young lady's pardon, it is just like the 
family. No consideration! No consideration for 
anyone! It is the same with his treatment of the 
poor. I am talking of Mr. Romer, you know, Miss. 
I would say the same thing to his face. Why is it 



42 WOOD AND STONE 

that hard-working clever fellows, like these Andersens 
for instance, should do all the labour, and he get all 
the profits? It isn't fair. It's unjust. It's an insult 
to God's beautiful earth, which is free to all." He 
paused to take breath, and looked to Maurice for 
confirmation of his words. 

"You are quite right, Wone; you are quite right," 
muttered the recluse in his beard, furtively glancing 
at Lacrima. 

Mr. Wone continued his discourse, making large 
and eloquent allusion to the general relations in 
England between employer and employed, and im- 
plying plainly enough his full knowledge that at least 
one of his hearers belonged to the latter class. His 
air, as he spoke, betrayed a certain disordered fanati- 
cism, quite genuine and deeply felt, but queerly 
mingled with an indescribable element of complacent 
self-conceit. Lacrima, in spite of considerable sym- 
pathy with much that he said, felt that there was, in 
the man himself, something so slipshod, so limp, so 
vague, and so patently vulgar, that both her respect 
for his sincerity and her interest in his opinions were 
reduced to nothing. Not only was he narrow-minded 
and ignorant; but there was also about him, in spite 
of the aggressive violence of his expressions, an odd 
sort of deprecatory, apologetic air, as though he were 
perpetually endeavouring to cajole his audience, by 
tacit references to his deferential respect for them. 
There was indeed more than a little in him of the sleek 
unction of the nonconformist preacher; and one could 
well understand how he might combine, precisely as 
Mr. Lickwit suspected, the divergent functions of the 
politician and the evangelist. 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 43 

"I tell you," he was saying, "the country will not 
long put up with this sort of thing. There is a move- 
ment, a tendency, a volcanic upheaval, a stirring of 
waters, which these plutocrats do not realize. There 
is a surging up from the depths of — of — " He 
paused for a word. 

"Of mud," murmured Mr. Quincunx. 

" — Of righteous revolt against these atrocious in- 
equalities! The working people are asleep no longer. 
They're roused. The movement's begun. The thun- 
der's gathering on the horizon. The armies of the 
exploited are feeling the impulse of their own strength, 
of that noble, that splendid anger, which, when it is 
conceived, will bring forth — will bring forth — " 

"Damnation," murmured Mr. Quincunx. 

The three figures as they stood, thus consorted, 
on the little stone bridge, made up a dramatic group. 
The sinking sun threw their shadows in long wavering 
lines upon the white road, distorting them to so 
grotesque a length that they nearly reached the open 
gates of the station. 

Human shadows! What a queer half -mocking com- 
mentary they make upon the vanity of our pas- 
sionate excitements, roused by anything, quieted by 
nothing, as the world moves round! 

Lacrima, in her shadow, was not beautiful at all. 
She was an elongated wisp of darkness. The beard 
of Mr. Quincunx looked as if it belonged to a mam- 
moth goat, and the neck of Mr. Wone seemed to 
support, not a human cranium at all, but a round, 
wagging mushroom. 

The hushed fields on each side of the way began to 
assume that magical softness which renders them, 



44 WOOD AND STONE 

at such an hour, insubstantial, unreal, remote, trans- 
formed. One felt as though the earth might indeed 
be worthy of better destinies than those that traced 
their fantastic trails up and down its peaceful surface. 
Something deeply withheld, seemed as though it only 
needed the coming of one god-like spirit to set it free 
forever, and, with it, all the troubled hearts of men. 
It was one of those moments which, whether the par- 
ticipants in them recognize them or not, at the actual 
time, are bound to recur, long afterwards, to their 
memory. 

Lacrima, half-listening to Mr. Wone, kept her head 
anxiously turned in the direction of the sheds, into 
one of which she had observed James Andersen enter. 

Maurice Quincunx, his mood clogged and clotted 
by jealousy, watched her with great melancholy grey 
eyes, while with his nervous fingers he plucked at his 
beard. 

"The time is coming — the time is coming"; cried 
Mr. Wone, striking with the back of his fist, the 
parapet against which he leaned, "when this exploita- 
tion of the poor by the rich will end once for all!" 
The warmth of his feeling was so great, that large 
drops of sweat trickled down his sallow cheeks, and 
hanging for a moment at the end of his narrow chin, 
fell into the dust. The man was genuinely moved; 
though in his watery blue eyes no trace of any fire 
was visible. He looked, in his emotion, like an 
hypnotized sick person, talking in the stress of a 
morbid fever. It was the revolt of one who carried 
the obsequious slavery of generations in his blood, 
and could only rebel in galvanized moribund spasms. 
The fellow was unpleasing, uninspiring: not the 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 45 

savage leader of a race of stern revolutionary devotees 
fired by the iron logic of their cause, but the inchoate 
inarticulate voice of clumsy protest, apologizing and 
propitiating, even while it protested. The vulgarity 
and meanness of the candidate's tone made one 
wonder how such a one as he could ever have been 
selected by the obscure working of the Spirit of Sacri- 
fice, to undertake this titanic struggle against the 
Spirit of Power. One turned away instinctively from 
his febrile rhetoric, to cast involuntary incense at the 
feet of the masterful enemy he opposed. He had no 
reticence in his enthusiasm, no reserve, no decency. 

"You may perhaps not know," he blundered on; 
"that the General Election is much nearer than people 
think. Mr. Romer will find this out; he will find it 
out; he will find it out! I have good authority 
for what I say. I speak of what I know, young 
lady." This was said rather severely, for Lacrima's 
attention was so obviously wandering. — "Of course 
you will not breathe a word of this, up there," 
— he nodded in the direction of the House. "It 
would not do. But the truth is, he is making a great 
mistake. I am prepared for this campaign, and he 
is not. He is even thinking of reducing the men's 
wages still further. The fool — the fool — the fool ! 
For he is a fool, you know, though he thinks he is so 
clever." 

Even Mr. Wone would scarcely have dared to 
utter these bold asseverations in the ear of Gladys 
Romer's cousin, if Maurice's innate indiscretion had 
not made it the gossip of the village that the Italian 
was ill-treated "among those people." To the 
pathetic man's poor vulgar turn of mind there was 



WOOD AND STONE 



something soothing in this confidential abuse of the 
lord of Nevilton Manor to his own relation. It had 
a squalid piquancy. It was itself a sort of revenge. 

Once more he began his spasmodic enunciation of 
those sad economic platitudes that are the refuge of 
the oppressed; but Mr. Quincunx had crossed the 
road, in the pursuit of a decrepit tiger-moth, and was 
listening no more. Lacrima's attention was com- 
pletely withdrawn. 

"Well, dear friends," he concluded, "I must really 
be getting back to my supper. Mrs. Wone will be 
unbearable if I am late." He hesitated a moment 
as if wondering whether the occasion called for any 
further domestic jocosity, to let these high matters 
lightly down to earth; but he contented himself with 
shaking hands with Mr. Quincunx and removing his 
hat to Lacrima. 

"Good night, dear friends," he repeated, drifting 
off, up the road, humming a hymn tune. 

"Poor man!" whispered the girl, "he means well." 

"He ought to be shot!" was the unexpected re- 
sponse of the hermit of Dead Man's Cottage, as he 
let the tiger-moth flutter down into the edge of the 
field. "He is no better than the rest. He is an 
idiot. He ought to learn Latin." 

They moved together towards the station. 

"I don't like the way you agree with people to 
their face," said Lacrima, "and abuse them behind 
their backs." 

"I don't like the way you hang about the roads 
with handsome stone-cutters," was Mr. Quincunx's 
surly retort. 

Meanwhile, a quite interesting little drama had 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 47 

been unfolding itself in the neighbourhood of the 
half-carved block of sandstone. Instructed, by a 
swift flash of perception, into what the situation 
implied, Luke's quick magnetic fingers soon drew 
from his companion's an electric responsive clasp, as 
they leant together over the mouldings. The warmth 
and pliable softness of the girl's body seemed to 
challenge the man with intimations of how quickly it 
would yield. He pointed to the shed-door, wide open 
behind them. 

"I will show you my work, in there, in a moment," 
he murmured, "as soon as they have gone." 

Her breast rose and fell under the increased excite- 
ment of her breathing. Violent quivers ran up and 
down her frame and communicated themselves to 
him. Their hearts beat fiercely in reciprocal agita- 
tion. Luke's voice, as he continued his conventional 
summary of the quality and destination of the stone, 
shook a little, and sounded queer and detached. 

"It is for Shaftesbury church," he said, "for the 
base of the column that supports the arch. This 
particular moulding is one which my father designed. 
You must remember that upon it will rest a great 
deal of the weight of the roof." 

His fellow workmen had now collected their tools 
and were shuffling nervously past them. It required 
all Gladys' sang-froid to give them the casual nod due 
from the daughter of the House to those who laboured 
in its service. As soon as they were well upon their 
way, with a quick glance at the distant figures of 
Lacrima and James, Gladys turned rapidly to her 
companion. 

"Show me," she said. 



48 WOOD AND STONE 

He went before her and stood in the entrance of 
the work-shop. When she had passed him into its 
interior, he casually closed behind them one of the 
rough folding doors. The contrast from the horizon- 
tal sun outside, turning the sandstone blocks into 
ruddy gold, to the shadowy twilight within, was 
strangely emphatic. He began to speak; saying he 
hardly knew what — some kind of stammered non- 
sense about the bases and capitals and carved mould- 
ings that lay around them. But Gladys, true to her 
feminine prerogative, swept all this aside. With a 
bold audacity she began at once. 

"How nice to be alone and free, for a little while!" 

Then, moving still further into the shadow, and 
standing, as if absorbed in interest, before the rough 
beginnings of a fluted pillar which reached as high as 
the roof — 

"What kind of top are you going to put on to that 
thing?" 

As she spoke she leant against the pillar with a 
soft, weary relaxation of her whole form. 

"Come near and tell me about it," she whispered, 
as if her breath caught in her throat. 

Luke recognized the tone — the tone that said, so 
much more distinctly than words, "I am ready. 
Why are you so slow?" He came behind her, and as 
gently and lightly as he could, though his arms 
trembled, let his fingers slide caressingly round her 
flexible figure. Her breath came in quick gasps, and 
one hot small hand met his own and pressed it against 
her side. Encouraged by this response, he boldly 
drew her towards him. She struggled a little; a shy 
girlish struggle, more than half conventional — and 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 49 

then, sliding round in his arms with a quick feline 
movement, she abandoned herself to her craving, and 
embraced him shamelessly and passionately. When 
at last in sheer weariness her arms relaxed and she 
sank down, with her hands pressed to her burning 
cheeks, upon an unfinished font, Luke Andersen 
thought that never to his dying day would he forget 
the serpentine clinging of that supple form and the 
pressure of those insatiable lips. He turned, a little 
foolishly, towards the door and kicked with his foot a 
fragment of a carved reredos. Then he went back to 
her and half-playfully, half-amorously, tried to remove 
her hands from her face. 

"Don't touch me! I hate you!" she said. 

"Please," he whispered, "please don't be unkind now. 
I shall never, never forget how sweet you've been." 

"Tell me more about this work of yours," she 
suddenly remarked, in a completely changed voice, 
rising to her feet. "I have always understood that 
you were one of our best workmen. I shall tell my 
father how highly I think of what you're doing — 
you and your brother. I am sure he will be glad to 
know what artists he has among his men." 

She gave her head a proud little toss and raised 
negligent deliberate hands to her disarranged fair 
hair, smoothing it down and readjusting her wide- 
brimmed hat. She had become the grand lady again 
and Luke had become the ordinary young stone- 
mason. Superficially, and with a charming grace, he 
adapted himself to this change, continuing his con- 
ventional remarks about fonts, pillars, crosses, and 
capitals; and calling her "Miss" or "Miss Gladys," 
with scrupulous discretion. But in his heart, all the 



50 WOOD AND STONE 

while, he was registering a deep and vindictive vow — 
a vow that, at whatever risk and at whatever cost, 
he would make this fair young despot suffer for her 
caprice. Gladys had indeed, quite unwittingly, 
entered into a struggle with a nature as remorseless 
and unscrupulous as her own. She had dreamed, in 
her imperial way, of using this boy for her amuse- 
ment, and then throwing him aside. She did not for 
a moment intend to get entangled in any sentimental 
relations with him. A passing "amour," leading to 
nothing, and in no way committing her, was what she 
had instinctively counted on. For the rest, in snatch- 
ing fiercely at any pleasure her fervent senses craved, 
she was as conscienceless and antinomian, as a young 
tiger out of the jungle. Nor had she the remotest 
sense of danger in this exciting sport. Corrupt and 
insensitive as any amorous courtezan of a pagan age, 
she trusted to her freedom from innocence to assure 
her of freedom from disaster. Vaguely enough in 
her own mind she had assumed, as these masterful 
"blond beasts" are inclined to assume, that in 
pouncing on this new prey she was only dealing once 
more with that malleable and timorous humanity she 
had found so easy to mould to her purpose in other 
quarters. She reckoned, with a pathetic simplicity, 
that Luke would be clay in her hands. As a matter 
of fact this spoiled child of the wealth produced by 
the Leonian stone had audaciously flung down her 
challenge to one who had as much in him as herself 
of that stone's tenacity and imperviousness. The 
daughter of sandstone met the carver of sandstone; 
and none, who knew the two, would have dared to 
predict the issue of such an encounter. 



REPRISALS FROM BELOW 51 

The young man was still urbanely and discreetly 
discoursing to his lady-visitor upon the contents of 
the work-shop, when the tall figure of James Andersen 
darkened the door. 

"Excuse me, Miss," he said to Gladys, "but Miss 
Lacrima asked me to tell you that she was waiting 
for you on the bridge." 

"Thank you, James," answered the girl simply, 
"I will come. I am afraid my interest in all the 
things your brother has been so kindly showing me 
has made you both late. I am sorry." Here she 
actually went so far as to fumble in her skirt for her 
purse. After an awkward pause, during which the 
two men waited at either side of the door, she 
found what she sought, and tripping lightly by, 
turned as she passed Luke and placed in his hand, 
the hand that so recently had been clasped about her 
person, the insolent recompense of a piece of silver. 
Bidding them both good-night, she hurried away 
to rejoin Lacrima, who, having by this time got rid 
of Mr. Quincunx, moved down the road to meet 
her. 

Luke closed and locked the door of the shed without 
a word. Then to the astonishment of James Ander- 
sen he proceeded to dance a kind of grotesque war- 
dance, ending it with a suppressed half- mocking 
howl, as he leant exhausted against the wall of the 
building. 

"I've got her, I've got her, I've got her!" he 
repeated. "James, my darling Daddy James, I've got 
this girl in the palm of my hand!" He humorously 
proceeded to toss the coin she had given him high in 
the air. "Heads or tails?" he cried, as the thing fell 



52 WOOD AND STONE 



among the weeds. "Heads! It's heads, my boy' 
That means that Miss Gladys Romer will be sorry 
she ever stepped inside this work-shop of ours. Come, 
let's wash and eat, my brother; for the gods have 
been good to us today." 



CHAPTER V 
FRANCIS TAXATER 

THE day following the one whose persuasive 
influence we have just recorded was not 
less auspicious. The weather seemed to have 
effected a transference of its accustomed quality, 
bringing to the banks of the Yeo and the Parret the 
atmospheric conditions belonging to those of the 
Loire or the Arno. 

Having finished her tea Valentia Seldom was stroll- 
ing meditatively up and down the vicarage terrace, 
alternately stopping to pick off the petals of a dead 
flower, or to gaze, with a little gloomy frown, upon 
the grass of the orchard. 

Her slender upright figure, in her black silk dress, 
made a fine contrast to the rich green foliage about 
her, set on one side with ruby-coloured roses and on 
the other with yellow buttercups. But the old lady 
was in no peaceful frame of mind. Every now and 
then she tapped the gravel impatiently with her 
ebony stick; and the hand that toyed with the 
trinkets at her side mechanically closed and unclosed 
its fingers under the wrist-band of Mechlin lace. It 
was with something of an irritable start, that she 
turned round to greet Francis Taxater, as led by the 
little servant he presented himself to her attention. 
He moved to greet her with his usual imperturbable 
gravity, walking sedately along the edge of the flowery 



54 WOOD AND STONE 

border; with one shoulder a little higher than the 
other and his eyes on the ground. 

His formidable prelatical chin seemed more than 
ever firmly set that afternoon, and his grey waist- 
coat, under his shabby black coat, was tightly drawn 
across his emphatic stomach. His coal-black eyes, 
darkened yet further by the shadow of his hat, 
glanced furtively to right and left of him as he ad- 
vanced. In the manner peculiar to persons disciplined 
by Catholic self-control, his head never followed, by 
the least movement, the shrewd explorations of these 
diplomatic eyes. 

One would have taken him for a French bishop, of 
aristocratic race, masquerading, for purposes of dis- 
cretion, in the dress of a secular scholar. 

Everything about Francis Taxater, from the noble 
intellectual contours of his forehead, down to his 
small satyr-like feet, smacked of the courtier and the 
priest; of the learned student, and the urbane fre- 
quenter of sacred conclaves. His small white hand, 
plump and exquisitely shaped, rested heavily on his 
cane. He carried with him in every movement and 
gesture that curious air of dramatic weight and im- 
portance which men of diplomatic experience are 
alone able to use without letting it degenerate into 
mannerism. It was obvious that he, at any rate, 
according to Mr. Quincunx's favourite discrimination, 
"knew Latin." He seemed to have slid, as it were, 
into this commercial modern world, from among the 
contemporaries of Bossuet. One felt that his authors 
were not Ibsen or Tolstoy, but Horace and Cicero. 

One felt also, however, that in sheer psychological 
astuteness not even Mr. Romer himself would be a 



FRANCIS TAXATER 55 

match for him. Between those two, the man of 
modern wisdom and the man of ancient wisdom, any 
struggle that might chance to occur would be a singu- 
larly curious one. If Mr. Taxater really was "on the 
side of the angels," he was certainly there with the 
full weight of organized hierarchies. If he did exert 
his strength upon the side of "meekness," it would 
be a strength of no feverish, spasmodic eruption. 

If Satan threw a Borgia in Mr. Taxater's path, 
that Borgia, it appeared, would find his Machiavel. 

"Yes, it is a lovely day again," said the old lady, 
leading her visitor to a seat and placing herself by his 
side. "But what is our naughty Monsignor doing, 
playing truant from his consistory? I thought you 
would be in London this week — at the Eucharist 
Conference your people are holding? Is it to the 
loveliness of the weather that we owe this pleasant 
surprise?" 

One almost expected — so formal and old-fashioned 
were the two interlocutors — that Mr. Taxater would 
have replied, in the tone of Ivanhoe or the Talisman, 
"A truce to such jesting, Madam!" No doubt if he 
had, the lady would hardly have discerned any 
anachronism. As a matter of fact he did not answer 
her question at all, but substituted one of his own. 

"I met Vennie in the village," he said. "Do you 
think she is happier now, in her new English circle?" 

"Ah! my friend," cried the old lady, in a nervous 
voice, "it is of Vennie that I have been thinking all 
this afternoon. No, I cannot say I think she is hap- 
pier. I wonder if it is one thing; and then I wonder 
if it is another. I cannot get to the bottom of it and 
it worries me." 



56 WOOD AND STONE 

"I expect it is her nerves," said the diplomatist. 
"Though the sun is so warm, there has been a con- 
stant east wind lately; and, as you know, I put down 
most of our agitations to the presence of east wind." 

"It will not do, Mr. Taxater; it will not do! It 
may be the east wind with you and me. It is not 
the east wind with Vennie. Something is troubling 
her. I wish I could discern what it is?" 

"She isn't by any chance being vexed by some 
theological dispute with the Vicar, is she? I know 
how seriously she takes all his views. And his views 
are, if I may say so, decidedly confusing. Don't 
misunderstand me, dear lady. I respect Mr. Clavering 
and admire him. I like the shape of his head; es- 
pecially when he wears his beretta. But I cannot 
feel much confidence in his wisdom in dealing with a 
sensitive child like your daughter. He is too im- 
pulsive. He is too dogmatic. He lives too entirely 
in the world of doctrinal controversy. It is danger- 
ous"; here Mr. Taxater luxuriously stretched out his 
legs and lit a cigarette; "it is dangerous to live only 
for theology. We have to learn to live for Religion; 
and that is a much more elaborate affair. That 
extends very far, Mrs. Seldom." The old lady let 
her stick slide to the ground and clasped her hands 
together. "I want to ask you one thing, Mr. Taxater. 
And I implore you to be quite direct with me. You 
do not think, do you, that my girl is tending towards 
your church — towards Rome? I confess it would 
be a heavy blow to me, one of the heaviest I have 
ever had, if anything of that kind happened. I know 
you are tolerant enough to let me speak like this 
without scruple. I like you, my dear friend — " 



FRANCIS TAXATER 51 

Here a soft flush spread over Valentia's ivory-coloured 
cheeks and she made a little movement as if to put 
her hand on her companion's arm. "I like you 
yourself, and have the utmost confidence in you. But 
Oh, it would be a terrible shock to me if Vennie became 
a Roman Catholic. She would enter a convent; I 
know she would enter a convent and that would be 
more than I could bear." The accumulated distress 
of many years was in the old lady's voice and tears 
stood in her eyes. "I know it is silly," she went on 
as Mr. Taxater steadily regarded the landscape. 
"But I cannot help it. I do so hope — Oh, I can't tell 
you how much — that Vennie will marry and have 
children. It is the secret burden of my life, the 
thought that, with this frail little thing, our ancient 
race should disappear. I feel it my deepest duty — 
my duty to the Past and my duty to the Future — 
to arrange a happy marriage for her. If only that 
could be achieved, I should be able to die content." 

"You have no evidence, no authority for thinking," 
said Mr. Taxater gravely, "that she is meditating 
any approach to my church, as you call it, have you ? " 

"Oh no!" cried the old lady, "quite the contrary. 
She seems absorbed in the services here. She works 
with Mr. Clavering, she discusses everything with 
Mr. Clavering, she helps Mr. Clavering with the poor. 
I believe" — here Valentia lowered her voice; "I 
believe she confesses to Mr. Clavering." 

Francis Taxater smiled — the smile of the heir of 
Christendom's classic faith at these pathetic fumblings 
of heresy — and carefully knocked the ashes from his 
cigarette against the handle of his cane. 

"You don't think, dear lady," he said, "that by 



58 WOOD AND STONE 

any chance — girls are curiously subtle in these little 
things — she is 'in love,' as they call it, with our 
nice handsome Vicar?" 

Valentia gave an involuntary little start. In her 
heart there rose up the shadow of a shadow of ques- 
tioning, whether in this last remark the great secular 
diplomatist had not lapsed into something approach- 
ing a "faux pas." 

"Certainly not," she answered. "Vennie is not a 
girl to mix up her religion with things of that sort." 

Francis Taxater permitted the flicker of a smile to 
cross his face. He slightly protruded his lower lip 
which gave his countenance a rather sinister expres- 
sion. His look said, more clearly than words, that in 
his opinion there was no woman on earth who did 
not "mix up these things" with her religion. 

"I have not yet made my request to you," con- 
tinued the old lady, with a certain nervous hesitation. 
"I am so afraid lest you should think it an evidence 
of a lack of confidence. It isn't so! It really isn't 
so. I only do it to relieve my mind; — to make my 
food taste better, if you understand? — and to stop 
this throbbing in my head." She paused for a mo- 
ment, and picking up her stick, prodded the gravel 
with it, with lowered face. The voices of not less 
than three wood-pigeons were audible from the 
apple-orchard. And this soft accompaniment to her 
words seemed to give her courage. Fate could not, 
surely, altogether betray her prayers, in a place so 
brooded over by "the wings of the dove." In the 
exquisite hush of the afternoon the birds' rich voices 
seemed to take an almost liturgical tone — as though 
they were the ministers of a great natural temple. 



FRANCIS TAXATER 59 

To make a solemn request of a dear friend under such 
conditions was almost as though one were exacting 
a sacred vow under the very shadow of the altar. 

So at least Valentia felt, as she uttered her serious 
petition; though it may well be that Mr. Taxater, 
skilled in the mental discipline of Saint Ignatius, knew 
better how to keep the distracting influences of mere 
"Nature," in their proper secondary place. 

"I want you faithfully to promise me," she said, 
"that you will in no way — in no way at all — use 
your influence over Vennie to draw her from her 
English faith." The old lady's voice became quite 
husky in her emotion. "It would be dreadful to me 
to think, — I could not bear to think " — she went 
on, "that you should in the smallest degree use your 
great powers of mind to disturb the child's present 
attitude. If she is not happy, it is not — Oh, I assure 
you, it is not — in any sense due to her being dis- 
satisfied with her religion. It must be something 
quite different. What it is, I cannot guess; but it 
must be something quite different from that. Well, 
dear friend," and she did now, quite definitely, lay 
her hand on his arm, "will you promise this for me? 
You will? I know you will." 

Francis Taxater rose from his seat and stood over 
her very gravely, leaning upon his cane. 

"You have done well to tell me this, Mrs. Seldom," 
he said. "Most certainly I shall make no attempt to 
influence Vennie. It would be indeed contrary to all 
that I regard as wise and suitable in the relations 
between us. I never convert people. I believe you 
will find that very few of those who are born Catho- 
lics ever interfere in that way. It is the impetuosity 



60 WOOD AND STONE 

of new-comers into the church that gives us this 
bad name. They often carry into their new faith 
the turbulent theological zeal which distinguished 
them in their old one. I, at any rate, am not like 
that. I leave people alone. I prefer to watch them 
develop on their own lines. The last thing I should 
wish to do would be to meddle with Vennie's religious 
taste. It would be a blunder as well as an imperti- 
nence. Vennie would be the first to resist any such 
proceeding. It would destroy her respect for me. It 
might even destroy her affection for me. It certainly 
would not move her. Indeed, dear lady, if I wished 
to plant the child's soul irrevocably in the soil pre- 
pared by our good vicar I could not do anything 
more effective than try to persuade her of its de- 
ficiencies. No, no! You may rely upon me to stand 
completely aside in this matter. If Vennie were led 
to join us — which for your sake, dear Mrs. Sel- 
dom, I hope will never happen, — you may accept 
my word of honour it will be from her own spon- 
taneous impulse. I shall make not the least move- 
ment in the direction you fear. That I can devoutly 
promise." 

He turned away his head and regarded with calm, 
placid detachment the rich, shadowy orchard and 
the golden buttercups. 

The contours of his profile were so noble, and the 
pose of his head so majestic, that the agitated mother 
was soothed and awed into complete confidence. 

"Thank God!" she exclaimed. "That fear, at any 
rate, has passed. I shall be grateful to you forever, 
dear friend, for what you have just now said. It is 
a direct answer to my prayers." 



FRANCIS TAXATER 61 

"May I, in my turn," said Mr. Taxater, resuming 
his seat by her side, "ask you a bold and uncalled 
for question? What would you do, if in the changes 
and chances of this life, Vennie did come to regard 
Mr. Clavering with favour? Would you for a mo- 
ment consider their union as a possible one?" 

Valentia looked not a little embarrassed. Once 
more, in her heart, she accused the urbane scholar 
of a lack of delicacy and discretion. These little 
questions are not the ones to put to a perturbed 
mother. 

However, she answered him plainly enough. "I 
should not like it, I confess. It would disappoint 
me. I am not ambitious, but sometimes I catch 
myself desiring, for my beloved child, a marriage that 
would give her the position she deserves, the position 
— pardon a woman's weakness, sir! — that her an- 
cestors held in this place. But then, again, I am 
only anxious for her happiness. No, Mr. Taxater. 
If such a thing did occur I should not oppose it, 
Mr. Clavering is a gentleman, though a poor one and, 
in a sense, an eccentric one. But I have no predju- 
dice against the marriage of our clergy. In fact I 
think they ought to marry. It is so suitable, you 
know, to have a sensible woman endowed with such 
opportunities for making her influence felt. I would 
not wish Vennie to marry beneath her, but sooner 
than not see her married — well ! — That is the 
kind of feeling I have about it, Mr. Taxater." 

"Thank you — thank you. I fear my question 
was impertinent; but in return for the solemn oath 
you exacted from me, I think I deserved some re- 
ward, don't you? But seriously, Mrs. Seldom, I 



62 WOOD AND STONE 

do not think that any of these less desirable fates 
will befall our dear child. I think she will marry a 
pillar of the aristocracy, and remain herself a pillar 
of the Anglican Church! I trust she will not, what- 
ever happens, lose her regard for her old Catholic 
friend." 

He rose as he spoke and held out his hand. Mrs. 
Seldom took it in her own and held it for a moment 
with some emotion. Had he been a real Monsignor, 
he could not have looked more calm, more tolerant, 
more kind, than he looked at that moment. He 
wore the expression that high ecclesiastics must come 
to wear, when devoted but somewhat troublesome 
daughters of the church press close to kiss the ame- 
thystine ring. 

A few minutes later he was passing out of the 
vicarage gate. The new brood of warblers that 
flitted about the tall bushes at that spot heard — 
with perfect unconcern — a mysterious Latin quota- 
tion issue from that restrained mouth. They could 
hardly be blamed for not understanding, even though 
they had migrated to these fields of heresy from more 
classic places, that the plain English interpretation 
of the dark saying was that all things are lawful to 
him whose motive is the "Potestas Civitatis Dei!" 

He crossed the dusty road and was proceeding 
towards his own house, which was hardly more than 
a hundred yards away, when he saw through a wide 
gap in the hedge a pleasant and familiar sight. It 
was a hay-field, in the final stage of its "making," 
surrendering to a great loose stack, built up beneath 
enormous elm-trees, the last windrows of its sweet- 
scented harvest. 



FRANCIS TAXATER 63 

Pausing for a moment to observe more closely this 
pleasant scene — for hay-making in Dorsal Field 
amounted to a village ritual — Mr. Taxater became 
aware that among the figures scattered in groups 
about the meadow were the very two whose relation 
to one another he had just been discussing. Vennie 
and the young clergyman were engaged in an ani- 
mated conversation with three of the farm-boys. 

Mr. Taxater at once climbed through the gap, and 
crossing the field approached the group unobserved. 
It was not till he was quite close that Vennie caught 
sight of him. Her pale, pinched little face, under its 
large hat, flushed slightly as she held out her hand; 
but her great steady grey eyes were full of friendly 
welcome. 

Mr. Clavering too was effusive and demonstrative 
in his greeting. They chatted a little of indifferent 
matters, and the theologian was introduced to the 
shy farm-boys, who stared at him in rustic wonder. 

Then Hugh Clavering said, "If you'll pardon me 
for a moment, I think I ought to go across and speak 
to John Goring," and he indicated the farmer's 
figure bending over a new gleaning-machine, at the 
opposite end of the field. "Don't go away, please, 
Mr. Taxater, till I come back. You will keep him, 
won't you, Miss Seldom?" 

He strode off; and the boys drifted away after 
him, leaving Mr. Taxater and the girl together, 
under the unfinished hay-stack. "I was so much 
wanting to speak to you," began Vennie at once. 
"I very nearly ran in to the Gables; but I saw Mrs. 
Watnot over the wall, and she told me you were 
out. I am in serious need of advice upon a thing 



64 WOOD AND STONE 

that is troubling me, and you are the only person 
who can really help." 

The expression of Mr. Taxater's face at that mo- 
ment was so sympathetic, and yet so grave, that one 
would hardly have been surprised to hear him utter 
the conventional formula of a priest awaiting con- 
fession. Though unuttered, the sacred formula must 
have been telepathically communicated, for Vennie 
continued without a pause, holding her hands behind 
her back, and looking on the ground. "Ever since 
our last serious conversation — do you remember? — 
after Easter, I have been thinking so much about 
that phrase of yours, referring to the Pope, as the 
eternal living defender of the idea of Love as the 
secret of the universe. Mr. Clavering talks to 
me about love — you know what I mean," she smiled 
and blushed prettily, with a quick lifting of her head, 
"but he never gives me the feeling of something real 
and actual which we can approach on earth — some- 
thing personal, I mean. And I have been feeling so 
much lately that this is what I want. Mr. Clavering 
is very gentle with me when I try to explain my 
difficulties to him; but I don't think he really under- 
stands. The way he talks is beautiful and inspiring 
— but it somehow sounds like poetry. It does not 
give me anything to lay hands on." And she looked 
into Mr. Taxater's face with a pathetic wide-eyed 
appeal, as if he were able to call down angels from 
heaven. 

"Dear child," said the diplomatist, "I know only 
too well what you mean. Yes, that is the unfortu- 
nate and necessary limitation of a heretical church. 
It can only offer mystic and poetic consolations. It 



FRANCIS TAXATER 65 

has lost touch with the one true Vine, and conse- 
quently the full stream of life-giving sap cannot flow 
through its veins." 

"But I have felt so strengthened," said Vennie 
mournfully, "by the sacrament in our Church; so 
strengthened and inspired! It seems dreadful that 
it should all be a sort of mockery." 

"Do not speak like that, dear child," said Mr. 
Taxater. "God is good; and in his knowledge of 
our weakness he permits us to taste of his mystery 
even in forbidden cups. The motive in your heart, 
the faith in your soul, have been pure; and God has 
given to them some measure, though but an imper- 
fect one, of what he will grant to your complete 
obedience." 

Vennie bent down and picking up a swathe of 
sweet-scented hay twisted it thoughtfully in her 
fingers. "God has indeed been working miracles on 
your behalf," continued Mr. Taxater. "It must have 
been your guardian angel that led me to speak to 
you as I did at that time. For in future, I regret 
to say, I shall be less free. But the good work has 
been done. The seed has been sown. What follows 
must be at your own initiative." 

Vennie looked at him, puzzled, and rather alarmed. 
"Why do you say you will be less free? Are we 
going to have no more lovely conversations at the 
bottom of our orchard? Are you going to be too 
busy to see me at all?" 

Mr. Taxater smiled. "Oh no, it isn't as bad as 
that," he said. "It is only that I have just faith- 
fully promised your mother not to convert you to 
Catholicism." 



66 WOOD AND STONE 

"Mother had no right to make you give any such 
promise," cried the girl indignantly. 

"No," responded the diplomatist, "she had no 
such right. No one has a right to demand promises 
of that kind. It is one of the worst and subtlest 
forms of persecution." 

"But you did not promise? You surely did not 
promise?" 

"There was no escaping it," replied Mr. Taxater. 
"If I had not done so she would have given you no 
peace, and your future movements would have been 
mercilessly watched. However," he went on, smil- 
ingly, "a promise exacted under that kind of com- 
pulsion must be interpreted in a very large and 
liberal way. Relatively I must avoid discussing 
these things with you. In a higher and more abso- 
lute sense we will combine our thoughts about them, 
day and night, until we worship at the same altar." 

Vennie was silent. The noble and exalted sophistry 
of the subtle scholar puzzled and bewildered her. 
"But I have no idea of what to do next," she pro- 
tested. "I know no Catholics but you. I should 
feel very nervous on going to the priest in Yeobor- 
ough. Besides, I don't at all like the look of him. 
And the people here say he is often drunk. You 
wouldn't send me to a man like that, would you? 
Oh, I feel so angry with mother! She had no right 
to go to you behind my back." 

Francis Taxater laid his hand gently on the girl's 
shoulder. "There is no reason for haste," he said. 
"There is no cause to agitate yourself. Just remain 
quietly as you are. Say nothing to your mother. 
It would only cause her unnecessary distress. I 



FRANCIS TAXATER 67 

never promised not to lend you books. All my 
shelves are at your service. Read, my dear Vennie, 
read and think. My books will supply the place of 
my words. Indeed, they will serve the purpose much 
better. In this way we shall at once be obeying 
your earthly mother, and not disobeying your heav- 
enly mother, who is now — Ave Maria gratiae plena ! 
— drawing you so strongly towards her." 

"Shall I say anything to Mr. Clavering?" 

"Not a word! not a word! And enter as little as 
possible into argument with him. If he fancies, from 
your silence, that he has quelled your doubts, let 
him fancy so. The mistake will be due to his own 
pride and not to any deception. It is wrong to lie — 
but we are not called upon to dispel illusions arising 
from the self-conceit of others." 

"But you — will — think — of me?" pleaded little 
Vennie. "I may know that you have not deserted 
me? That you are always ready — always there?" 

Mr. Taxater smiled benignly. "Of course I shall 
be ready, dear child. And you must be ready. That 
is why I only ask you to read and think. God will 
answer your prayers if you show patience. He has 
taught his church never to clamour for hurried con- 
versions. But to wait, with all her reservoirs of mys- 
teries, till they come to her of their own accord. 
You will come, Vennie, you will come! But it will be 
in God's hour and not in ours." 

Vennie Seldom thanked him with a timid glance of 
infinite gratitude and confidence. A soft luminous 
happiness suffused her being, into which the scents 
and sounds of that felicitous hour poured their offer- 
ings of subtle contentment. In after years, in strange 



68 WOOD AND STONE 

and remote places, she never forgot the high thrilling 
exultation, calm, yet passionate as an indrawn wave, 
of that unrecurring moment. 

The security that filled her passed, indeed, only 
too quickly away. Her face clouded and a little anx- 
ious frown puckered her narrow white forehead. 

"There is something else I wanted to ask you," 
she said hurriedly, "and I must say it quickly be- 
cause I am afraid of Mr. Clavering coming back. 
It has to do with Mr. Clavering. I do not think 
you realize what influence you have over people, 
what powerful influence! Mr. Clavering adores you. 
He would do anything for you. He respects you as a 
thinker. He venerates you as a good man. Now, 
Mr. Taxater, please, please, use you influence with 
him to save him — to save him — " She stopped 
abruptly, and a flood of colour rushed to her cheeks. 

"To save him from what, dear child? I am afraid 
there is no hope of Mr. Clavering coming to our 
way of thinking." 

"It isn't that, Mr. Taxater! Its something else; — 
something to do with his own happiness, with his 
own life. Oh, it is so hard for me to tell you!" She 
clenched her hands tightly together and looked 
steadily away from him as she spoke. "It is that 
that dreadful Gladys Homer has been plaguing him 
so — tempting him to flirt with her, to be silly about 
her, and all that sort of thing. He does not really 
like her at all. That I know. But he is passionate 
and excitable, and easily led away by a girl like that. 
Oh, it all sounds so absurd, as I say it," cried poor 
Vennie, with cheeks that were by this time flaming, 
"but it's much, much more serious than it sounds. 



FRANCIS TAXATER 69 

You see, I know Mr. Clavering very well. I know 
how simple and pure-minded he is. And I know how 
desperately he prays against being led away — like 
this. Gladys does not care for him really a bit. 
She only does it to amuse herself; to satisfy her 
wicked, wicked nature! She would like to lead him as 
far as she possibly could, and then to turn upon 
him and make him thoroughly miserable. She is 
the kind of girl — Oh what am I saying to you, Mr. 
Taxater? — that men always are attracted by. Some 
men I believe would even call her beautiful. I don't 
think she's that at all. I think she is gross, fleshly, 
and horrid! But I know what a danger she is to 
Mr. Clavering. I know the dreadful struggle that 
goes on in his mind; and the horrible temptation she 
is to him. I know that after seeing her he always 
suffers the most cruel remorse. Now, Mr. Taxater, 
use your influence to strengthen him against this 
girl's treachery. She only means him harm, I know 
she does! And if a person like you, whom he loves 
and admires so much, talked to him seriously about 
it, it would be such a help to him. He is so young. 
He is a mere boy, and absolutely ignorant of the 
world. He does not even realize that the village has 
already begun its horrid gossip about them. Do — 
do, do something, Mr. Taxater. It is like that young 
Parsifal, in the play, being tempted by the en- 
chantress." 

"But how do they meet?" asked the diplomatist, 
with unchanged gravity. "I do not see how they 
are ever alone together." 

"She has arranged it. She is so clever; the bad, 
bad girl! She goes to him for confirmation lessons. 



70 WOOD AND STONE 

He teaches her in his study twice a week — separately 
from the others." 

"But her father is a Unitarian." 

"That does not interfere. She does what she likes 
with Mr. Romer. Her game now is to want to be 
baptized into our church. She is going to be baptized 
first, and then confirmed." 

"And the preparation for baptism is as dangerous 
as the preparation for confirmation." remarked the 
scholar; straightening the muscles of his mouth, after 
the discipline of St. Ignatius. 

"The whole thing is horrible — dreadful! It frets 
me every hour of the day. He is so good and so 
innocent. He has no idea where she is leading him." 

"But I cannot prevent her wanting to be bap- 
tized," said Mr. Taxater. 

"You can talk to him," answered Vennie, with 
intense conviction. "You can talk to him and he 
will listen to you. You can tell him the danger he 
is in of being made miserable for life." She drew her 
breath deeply. "Oh the remorse he will feel; the 
horrible, horrible remorse!" 

Mr. Taxater glanced across the hay-field. The sun, 
a red globe of fire, was resting on the extreme edge 
of Leo's Hill, and seemed like a great blood-shot 
eye regarding them with lurid interest. Long cool 
shadows, thrown across the field by the elms in the 
hedge and by the stack beside them, melted magically 
into one another, and made the hillocks of still un- 
gathered grass soft and intangible as fairy graves. 

"I will do my best," said the scholar. "I will do 
my best." And indicating to Vennie, who was ab- 
sorbed in her nervous gratitude, the near approach 



FRANCIS TAXATER 71 

of the object of their saintly conspiracy, he led her 
forward to meet the young clergyman with an appro- 
priate air of friendly and casual nonchalance. 

"I am sorry to have to say it," was Mr. Clavering's 
greeting, "but that farmer-fellow is the only person in 
my parish for whom I have a complete detestation. 
I wish to goodness Mr. Romer had never brought 
him into the place!" 

"I don't like the look of his back, I must say," 
answered the theologian, following with his eyes the 
retreating figure of Mr. John Goring. 

"He is," said the young priest, "without exception 
the most repulsive human being I have ever met in 
my life. Our worthy Romer is an angel of light 
compared with him." 

With Mr. Goring still as their topic, they strolled 
amicably together towards the same gap in the hedge, 
through which the apologist of the papacy had 
emerged an hour before. There they separated; 
Vennie returning to the vicarage, and the youog 
clergyman carrying off Mr. Taxater to supper with 
him in his house by the church. 

Clavering's establishment consisted of a middle- 
aged woman of inordinate volubility, and the woman's 
daughter, a girl of twelve. 

The supper offered by the priest to his guest was 
"light and choice" — nor did it lack its mellow 
accompaniment of carefully selected, if not "Attic," 
wine. Of this wine Mr. Taxater did not hesitate to 
partake freely, sitting, when the meal was over, 
opposite his host at the open window, through which 
the pleasant murmurs of the evening, and the voices of 
the village-street, soothingly and harmoniously floated. 



72 WOOD AND STONE 

The famous theologian was in an excellent temper. 
Rich recondite jests pursued one another from his 
smiling lips, and his white hands folded themselves 
complacently above the cross on his watch-chain. 

Lottie Fringe, the child of Clavering's servant, 
tripped sportively in and out of the room, encouraged 
in her girlish coquetries by the amiable scholar. 
She was not yet too old to be the kittenish plaything 
of the lighter moments of a wise and scholarly man, 
and it was pleasant to watch the zest with which the 
vicar's visitor entered into her sportive audacities. 
Mr. Taxater made her fill and refill his glass, and 
taking her playfully on his knee, kissed her and 
fondled her many times. It was the vicar himself, 
who finally, a little embarrassed by these levities, sent 
the girl off to the kitchen, apologizing to his guest for 
the freedom she displayed. 

"Do not apologize, dear Mr. Clavering," said the 
theologian. "I love all children, especially when they 
are girls. There is something about the kisses of a 
young girl — at once amorous and innocent — which 
reconciles one to the universe, and keeps death at a 
distance. Could one for a moment think of death, 
when holding a young thing, so full of life and beauty, 
on one's knee?" 

The young priest's face clouded. "To be quite 
honest with you, Mr. Taxater," he murmured, in 
a troubled voice, "I cannot say that I altogether 
agree. We are both unconventional people, so I may 
speak freely. I do not think that one does a child 
any good by encouraging her to be playful and 
forward, in that particular way. You live with your 
books; but I live with my people, and I have 



FRANCIS TAXATER 73 

known so many sad cases of girls being completely 
ruined by getting a premature taste for coquetry of 
that kind." 

"I am afraid, my friend," answered Mr. Taxater, 
"that the worst of all heresies is lodged deep in your 
heart." 

"Heresies? God knows," sighed the priest, "I 
have enough evil in my heart — but heresies? I am 
at a loss to catch your meaning." 

In the absence of his playful Clerica — to use the 
Pantagruelian allusion — the great Homenas of Nevil- 
ton was compelled to fill his "tall-boy of extravagant 
wine" with his own hand. He did so, and continued 
his explanation. 

"By the worst of all heresies I mean the dangerous 
Puritan idea that pleasure itself is evil and a thing 
detestable to God. The Catholic doctrine, as I 
understand it, is that all these things are entirely 
relative to the persons concerned. Pleasure in itself 
is, in the Aristotelian sense, a supreme good. Every- 
one has a right to it. Everyone must have it. The 
whole thing is a matter of proportion and expediency. 
If an innocent playful game, of the kind you have 
just witnessed, was likely in this definite particular 
case to lead to harm, then you would be justified in 
your anxiety. But there must be no laying down of 
hard general rules. There must be no making a 
virtue of the mere denying ourselves pleasure." 

Mr. Clavering could hardly wait for his guest to 
finish. 

"Then, according to your theory," he exclaimed, 
"it would be right for you, or whoever you will, — 
pardon my making the thing so personal — to indulge 



74 WOOD AND STONE 

in casual levities with any pretty barmaid, as long as 
you vaguely surmised that she was a sensible girl and 
would not be harmed?" 

"Certainly it would be right," replied the papal 
apologist, sipping his wine and inhaling the perfume 
of the garden, "and not only right, but a plain duty. 
It is our duty, Mr. Clavering, to make the world 
happier while we live in it; and the way to make 
girls happier, especially when their occupations are 
laborious, is to kiss them; to give them innocent and 
admiring embraces." 

"I am afraid you are not quite serious, Mr. Taxa- 
ter," said the clergyman. "I have an absurd way of 
being direct and literal in these discussions." 

"Certainly, I am serious. Do you not know — 
young puritan — that some of the noblest spirits in 
history have not hesitated to increase the pleasure of 
girls' lives by giving them frequent kisses? In the 
Greek days he who could give the most charming kiss 
was awarded a public prize. In the Elizabethan days 
all the great and heroic souls, whose exquisite wit 
and passionate imagination put us still to shame, 
held large and liberal views on this matter. In the 
eighteenth century the courtly and moral Joseph 
Addison used never to leave a coffee-house, however 
humble and poor, without bestowing a friendly 
embrace upon every woman in it. The religious 
Doctor Johnson — a man of your own faith — was 
notoriously in the habit of taking his prettier visitors 
upon his knee, and tenderly kissing them. It is no 
doubt due to this fact, that the great lexicographer 
was so frequently visited; — especially by young 
Quakers. When we come to our own age, it is well 



FRANCIS TAXATER 15 

known that the late Archbishop Taraton, the refuter 
of Darwin, was never so happy as when romping 
round the raspberry-canes in his garden with a crowd 
of playful girls. 

"These great and wise men have all recognized the 
fact that pleasure is not an evil but a good. A good, 
however, that must be used discreetly and according 
to the Christian self-control of which God has given 
his Church the secret. The senses are not under a 
curse, Mr. Clavering. They are not given us simply 
to tempt and perplex us. They are given for our 
wise and moderate enjoyment." 

Francis Taxater once more lifted his glass to his 
lips. 

"To the devil with this Protestant Puritanism of 
yours! It has darkened the sun in heaven. It is 
the cause of all the squalid vice and gross excesses 
of our forlorn England. It is the cause of the 
deplorable perversities that one sees around one. It 
is the cause of that odious hypocrisy that makes 
us the laughing-stock of the great civilized nations 
of France, Italy and Spain." The theologian drew 
a deep breath, and continued. "I notice, Mr. 
Clavering, that you have by your side, still unfin- 
ished, your second glass of wine. That is a mis- 
take. That is an insult to Providence. Whatever 
may be your attitude towards these butterfly-wenches, 
it cannot, as a matter of poetic economy, be right 
to leave a wine, as delicate, as delicious as this, to 
spoil in the glass. 

" I suppose it has never occurred to you, Mr. Claver- 
ing, to go and sit, with the more interesting of your 
flock, at the Seldom Arms? It never has? So I 



76 WOOD AND STONE 

imagined from my knowledge of your uncivilized 
English ways. 

"The European cafe, sir, is the universal school 
of refined and intellectual pleasure. It was from 
his seat in a Roman cafe — a place not unknown to 
me myself — that the great Gibbon was accustomed 
to survey the summer moon, rising above the 
Pantheon. 

" It is the same in the matter of wine as in the other 
matter. It is your hypocritical and puritanical fear 
of pleasure that leads to the gross imbibing of villain- 
ous spirits and the subterranean slavery of prostitu- 
tion. If you allowed yourselves, freely, naturally, and 
with Christian moderation, to enjoy the admirable 
gifts of the supreme giver, there would no longer be 
any need for this deplorable plunging into insane vice. 
As it is — in this appalling country of yours — one 
can understand every form of debauchery." 

At this point Mr. Clavering intervened with an 
eager and passionate question. He had been listening 
intently to his visitor's words, and his clear-cut, mobile 
face had changed its expression more than once during 
this long discourse. 

"You do not, then, think," said he, in a tone of 
something like supplication, "that there is anything 
wrong in giving ourselves up to the intense emotion 
which the presence of beauty and charm is able to 
excite?" 

"Wrong?" said Mr. Taxater. "It is wrong to 
suppress such feelings! It is all a matter of propor- 
tion, my good sir, a matter of proportion and com- 
mon sense. A little psychological insight will soon 
make us aware whether the emotion you speak of is 



FRANCIS TAXATER 77 

likely to prove injurious to the object of our admira- 
tion." 

"But oneself — what about oneself?" cried the 
young priest. "Is there not a terrible danger, in all 
these things, lest one's spiritual ideal should become 
blurred and blighted?" 

To this question Mr. Taxater returned an answer 
so formidable and final, that the conversation was 
brought to an abrupt close. 

"What," he said, "has God given us the Blessed 
Sacraments for?" 

Hugh Clavering escorted his visitor to the corner of 
the street and bade him good-night there. As he 
re-entered his little garden, he turned for a moment to 
look at the slender tower of St. Catharine's church, 
rising calm and still into the hot June sky. Between 
him and it, flitted like the ghost of a dead Thais or 
Phryne, the pallid shadow of an impassioned tempt- 
ress holding out provocative arms. The form of the 
figure seemed woven of all the vapours of unbridled 
poetic fantasy, but the heavy yellow hair which most 
of all hid the tower from his view was the hair of 
Gladys Romer. 

The apologist of the papacy strolled slowly and 
meditatively back to his own house with the easy 
step of one who was in complete harmony both with 
gods and men. Above him the early stars began, one 
by one, to shine down upon the earth, but as he 
glanced up towards them, removing his hat and 
passing his hand across his forehead, the great 
diplomatist appeared quite untroubled by the ineffable 
littleness of all earthly considerations, under the re- 
moteness of those austere watchers. 



78 WOOD AND STONE 

The barking of dogs, in distant unknown yards, 
the melancholy cry of new-shorn lambs, somewhere 
far across the pastures, the soft, low, intermittent 
breathing, full of whispers and odours, of the whole 
mysterious night, seemed only to throw Mr. Taxater 
back more completely and securely upon that firm 
ecclesiastical tradition which takes the hearts of men 
in its hands and turns them away from the Outer 
Darkness. 

He let himself quietly into the Gables garden, by 
the little gate in the wall, and entered his house. 
He was surprised to find the door unlocked and 
a light burning in the kitchen. The careful Mrs. 
Wotnot was accustomed to retire to rest at a much 
earlier hour. He found the good woman extended at 
full length upon three hard chairs, her head supported 
by a bundle of shawls. She was suffering from one 
of her chronic rheumatic attacks, and was in consider- 
able distress. 

To a less equable and humane spirit there might 
have been something rather irritating than pathetic 
about this unexpected finale to a harmonious day. 
But Mr. Taxater's face expressed no sign of any feel- 
ing but that of grave and gentle concern. 

With some difficulty, for the muscles of her body 
were twisted by nervous spasms, the theologian sup- 
ported the old woman up the stairs, to her room 
under the eaves. Here he laid her upon the bed, and 
for the rest of the night refused to leave her room, 
rubbing with his white plump hands her thin old 
legs, and applying brandy to her lips at the moments 
when the nervous contractions that assailed her 
seemed most extreme. The delicate light of dawn 



FRANCIS TAXATER 79 

showed its soft bluish pallour at the small casemented 
window before the old lady fell asleep; but it was 
not till relieved by a woman who appeared, several 
hours later, with their morning's milk, that the 
defender of the Catholic Faith in Nevilton retired to 
his well-earned repose. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PARIAHS 

MR. QUINCUNX was digging in his garden. 
The wind, a little stronger than on the 
previous days and still blowing from the 
east, buffeted his attenuated figure and ruffled his 
pointed beard, tinged with premature grey. He dug 
up all manner of weeds, some large, some small, and 
shaking them carefully free of the adhesive earth, 
flung them into a wheel-barrow by his side. 

It was approaching noon, and in spite of the chilly 
gusts of wind, the sun beat down hotly upon the 
exposed front of Dead Man's Cottage. Every now 
and then Mr. Quincunx would leave his work; and 
retiring into his kitchen, proceed with elaborate 
nicety to stir a small pot of broth which simmered 
over the fire. He was a queer mixture of epicurean 
preciseness and ascetic indifference in these matters, 
but, on the whole, the epicurean tendency predomi- 
nated, owing to a subtle poetic passion in the eccentric 
man, for the symbolic charm of all these little neces- 
sities of life. The lighting of his fire in the morning, 
the crackling of the burning sticks, and their fragrant 
smell, gave Mr. Quincunx probably as much pleasure 
as anything else in the world. 

Every bowl of that fresh milk and brown bread, 
which, prepared with meticulous care, formed his 



THE PARIAHS 81 

staple diet, was enjoyed by him with more cere- 
monious concentration than most gourmands devote 
to their daintiest meat and wine. 

The broiling of his chicken on Sunday was a 
function of solemn ritual. Mr. Quincunx bent over 
the bird, basting it with butter, in the absorbed 
manner of a priest preparing the sacrament. 

The digging up of onions or lettuces in his garden, 
and the stripping them of their outer leaves, was a 
ceremony to be performed in no light or casual haste, 
but with a prepared and concentrated spirit. 

No profane hand ever touched the little canister of 
tea from which Mr. Quincunx, at the same precise 
hour every day, replenished his tea-pot. 

In all these material things his scrupulous and punc- 
tilious nicety never suffered the smallest diminution. 
His mind might be agitated to a point bordering upon 
despair, but he still, with mechanical foresight, sawed 
the fagots in his wood-shed and drew the water from 
his well. 

As he pulled up weed after weed, on this particular 
morning, his mind was in a state of extreme nervous 
agitation. Mr. Romer had called him up the night 
before to the House, and had announced that his 
present income — the sum regarded by the recluse as 
absolutely secure — was now entirely to cease, and 
in the place of it he was destined to receive, in return 
for horrible clerical work performed in Yeoborough, 
a considerably smaller sum, as Mr. Romer's paid 
dependent. 

The idea of working in an office was more distaste- 
ful to Mr. Quincunx than it is possible to indicate to 
any person not actually acquainted with him. His 



82 WOOD AND STONE 

exquisitely characteristic hand, admirably adapted to 
the meticulous diary he had kept for years, was 
entirely unsuited to competing with type-writing 
machines and machine-like type-writers. The walk 
to Yeoborough too, — a matter of some four or five 
miles — loomed upon him as a hideous purgatory. 
Walking tired him much more than working in his 
garden; and he had a nervous dread of those casual 
encounters and salutations on the way, which the 
habitual use of the same road to one's work neces- 
sarily must imply. 

His mind anticipated with hideous minuteness 
every detail of his future dreary life. He de- 
cided that even at the cost of the sacrifice of the 
last of his little luxuries he would make a point of 
going one way at least by train. That walk, twice a 
day, through the depressing suburbs of Yeoborough 
was more than he could bear to contemplate. It was 
characteristic of him that he never for a moment 
considered the possibility of an appeal to law. 
Law and lawyers were for Mr. Quincunx, with his 
instincts of an amiable anarchist, simply the engines 
through which the rich and powerful worked their 
will upon the weak and helpless. 

It was equally characteristic of him that it never 
entered his head to throw up his cottage, pack his 
scanty possessions and seek his fortune in another 
place. It was not only Lacrima that held him from 
such a resolution. It was as impossible for him to 
think of striking out in a new soil as it would have 
been for an aged frog to leave the pond of its nativity 
and sally forth across the fields in search of new 
waters. It was this inability to "strike out" and 



THE PARIAHS 83 

grapple with the world on equal terms, that had 
led, in the beginning, to his curious relation to the 
Romers. He clung to Susan Romer for no other 
reason than that she supplied a link between his 
past and his present. 

His lips trembled with anger and his hand shook, 
as he recalled the interview of the preceding night. 
The wife had annoyed him almost more than the 
husband. His brutality had been gross and frank. 
The lascivious joy of a strong nature, in deliberately 
outraging a weaker one, had gleamed forth from his 
jeering eyes. 

But there had been an unction, an hypocritical 
sentimentality, about Mrs. Romer's tone, that had 
made him hate her the more bitterly of the two. The 
fact that she also — stupid lump of fawning obesity 
as she was ! — was a victim of this imperial tyrant, 
did not in the least assuage him. The helot who is 
under the lash hates the helot who crouches by the 
master's chair, more deeply than he hates the master. 
It is because of this unhappy law of nature that there 
are so few successful revolts among our social Pariahs. 
The well-constituted ruler of men divides his serfs 
into those who hold the whip and those who are 
whipped. Yes, he hated her the most. But how he 
hated them both! 

The heart of your true Pariah is a strange and 
dark place, concealing depths of rancorous animosity, 
which those who over-ride and discount such feelings 
rarely calculate upon. It is a mistake to assume that 
this curious role — the role of being a Pariah upon 
our planet — is one confined to the submerged, the 
outcast, the criminal. 



84 WOOD AND STONE 

There are Pariahs in every village. It might be 
said that there are Pariahs in every family. The 
Pariah is one who is born with an innate inability 
to deal vigorously and effectively with his fellow 
animals. One sees these unfortunates every day — 
on the street, in the office, at the domestic hearth. 
One knows them by the queer look in their eyes; 
the look of animals who have been crushed rather 
than tamed. 

It is not only that they are weaker than the rest 
and less effectual. They are different. It is in their 
difference that the tragedy of their fate lies. Com- 
monplace weaklings, who are not born Pariahs, have 
in their hearts the same standards, the same ambi- 
tions, the same prejudices, as those who rule the 
world. Such weaklings venerate, admire, and even 
love the strong unscrupulous hands, the crafty un- 
scrupulous brains, who push them to and fro like 
pawns. 

But the Pariah does not venerate the Power 
that oppresses him. He despises it and hates it. 
Long-accumulated loathing rankles in his heart. He 
is crushed but not won. He is penned, like a shorn 
sheep; but his thoughts "wander through Eternity." 

And it is this difference, separating him from the 
rest, that excites such fury in those who oppress him. 
The healthy-minded prosperous man is irritated be- 
yond endurance by this stranger within the gate — 
this incorrigible, ineffectual critic, cumbering his road. 
The mob, too, always ready, like spiteful, cawing 
rooks, to fall upon a wounded comrade, howl re- 
morselessly for his destruction. The Pariah is seldom 
able to retain the sweetness of his natural affections. 



THE PARIAHS 85 

Buffetted by the unconscious brutality of those 
about him, he retorts with conscious and unfathom- 
able hatred. His soul festers and gangrenes within 
him, and the loneliness of his place among his fel- 
lows leads him to turn upon them all — like a rat in 
a gin. The pure-minded capable man, perceiving 
the rancorous misanthropy of this sick spirit, longs 
to trample him into the mud, to obliterate him, to 
forget him. But the man whose strength and cun- 
ning is associated with lascivious perversity, wishes 
to have him by his side, to humiliate, to degrade, to 
outrage. A taste to be surrounded by Pariahs is an 
interesting peculiarity of a certain successful class. 
Such companionship is to them a perpetual and 
pleasing reminder of their own power. 

Mr. Quincunx was a true Pariah in his miserable 
combination of inability to strike back at the people 
who injured him, and inability to forget their injuries. 
He propitiated their tastes, bent to their will, con- 
ciliated their pride, agreed with their opinions, and 
hated them with demoniacal hatred. 

As he pulled up his weeds in the hot sun, this 
particular morning, Maurice Quincunx fantastically 
consoled himself by imagining all manner of disasters 
to his enemies. Every time he touched with his 
hands the soft-crumbling earth, he uttered a kind of 
half-conscious prayer that, in precisely such a way, 
the foundations of Nevilton House should crumble and 
yield. Under his hat — for he was hypochondriacal^ 
apprehensive about sunstrokes — napped and waved 
in the wind a large cabbage leaf, placed carefully at 
the back of his head to protect his neck as he bent 
down. The shadow of this cabbage leaf, as it was 



86 WOOD AND STONE 

thrown across the dusty path, assumed singular and 
sinister shapes, giving the impression sometimes that 
the head of Mr. Quincunx was gnome-like or goblin- 
like in its proportions. 

Perhaps the most unfortunate characteristic of 
Pariahs is that though they cling instinctively to one 
another they are irritated and provoked by each 
other's peculiarities. 

This unhappy tendency was now to receive sad 
confirmation in our weed-puller's case, for he was 
suddenly interrupted by the appearance at his gate 
of Lacrima Traffio. 

He rose to meet her, and without inviting her to 
pass the entrance, for he was extremely nervous of 
village gossip, and one never knew what a casual 
passer-by might think, he leant over the low wall 
and talked with her from that security. 

She seemed in a very depressed and pitiable mood 
and the large dark eyes that fixed themselves upon 
her friend's face were full of an inarticulate appeal. 

"I cannot endure it much longer," she said. "It 
gets worse and worse every day." 

Maurice Quincunx knew perfectly well what she 
meant, but the curious irritation to which I have just 
referred drove him to rejoin: 

"What gets worse?" 

"Their unkindness," answered the girl with a quick 
reproachful look, "their perpetual unkindness." 

"But they feed you well, don't they?" said the 
hermit, removing his hat and rearranging the cabbage- 
leaf so as to adapt it to the new angle of the sun. 
"And they don't beat you. You haven't to scrub 
floors or mend clothes. People, like you and I, must 



THE PARIAHS 87 

be thankful for being allowed to eat and sleep at all 
on this badly-arranged earth." 

"I keep thinking of Italy," murmured Lacrima. 
"I think it is your English ways that trouble me. 
I don't believe — I can't believe — they always mean 
to be unkind. But English people are so heartless!" 

"You seemed to like that Andersen fellow well 
enough," grumbled Mr. Quincunx. 

"How can you be so silly, Maurice?" cried the 
girl, slipping through the gate in spite of its owner's 
furtive glances down the road. "How can you be so 
silly?" 

She moved past him, up the path, and seated her- 
self upon the edge of the wheel-barrow. 

"You can go on with your weeding," she said, "I 
can talk to you while you work." 

"Of course," murmured Mr. Quincunx, making no 
effort to resume his labour, "you naturally find a 
handsome fellow like that, a more pleasant companion 
than me. I don't blame you. I understand it very 
well." 

Lacrima impatiently took up a handful of groundsel 
and spurge from the dusty heap by her side and flung 
them into the path. 

"You make me quite angry with you, Maurice," 
she cried. "How can you say such things after all 
that has happened between us?" 

"That's the way," jeered the man bitterly, plucking 
at his beard. "That's the way! Go on abusing me 
because you are not living at your full pleasure, like a 
stall-fed upper-class lady!" 

"I shan't stay with you another moment," cried 
Lacrima, with tears in her eyes, "if you are so unkind." 



88 WOOD AND STONE 

As soon as he had reduced her to this point, Mr. 
Quincunx instantaneously became gentle and tender. 
This is one of the profoundest laws of a Pariah's 
being. He resents it when his companion in helpless- 
ness shows a spirit beyond his own, but directly such 
a one has been driven into reciprocal wretchedness, 
his own equanimity is automatically regained. 

After only the briefest glance at the gate, he put 
his arms round the girl and kissed her affectionately. 
She returned his embrace with interest, disarranging 
as she did so the cabbage-leaf in his hat, and causing 
it to flutter down upon the path. They leant to- 
gether for a while in silence, against the edge of the 
wheel-barrow, their hands joined. 

Thus associated they would have appeared, to the 
dreaded passer-by, in the light of a pair of extremely 
sentimental lovers, whose passion had passed into the 
stage of delicious melancholia. The wind whirled 
the dust in little eddies around them and the sun beat 
down upon their heads. 

"You must be kind to me when I come to tell you 
how unhappy I am," said the Italian. "You are the 
only real friend I have in the world." 

It is sad to have to relate that these tender words 
brought a certain thrill of alarm into the heart of 
Mr. Quincunx. He felt a sudden apprehension lest 
she might indicate that it was his duty to run away 
with her, and face the world in remote regions. 

No one but a born Pariah could have endured the 
confiding clasp of that little hand and the memory 
of so ardent a kiss without being roused to an impetu- 
osity of passion ready to dare anything to make her 
its own. 



THE PARIAHS 89 

Instead of pursuing any further the question of his 
friend's troubles, Mr. Quincunx brought the conver- 
sation round to his own. 

"The worst that could happen to me has hap- 
pened," he said, and he told her of his interview with 
the Romers the day before. The girl flushed with 
anger. 

"But this is abominable!" she cried, "simply 
abominable! You'd better go at once and talk it 
over with Mrs. Seldom. Surely, surely, something 
can be done! It is clear they have robbed you of 
your money. It is a disgraceful thing! Santa Maria 
— what a country this is!" 

"It is no use," sighed the man helplessly. "Mrs. 
Seldom can't help me. She is poor enough herself. 
And she will know as well as I do that in the matter 
of law I am entirely in their hands. My aunt had 
absolute confidence in Mr. Romer and no confidence 
in me. No doubt she arranged it with them that 
they were to dole me out the money like a charity. 
Mr. Romer did once talk about my lending it to him, 
and his paying interest on it, and so forth; but he 
managed all my aunt's affairs, and I don't know what 
arrangement he made with her. My aunt never 
liked me really. I think if she were alive now she 
would probably support them in what they are doing. 
She would certainly say, — she always used to say — 
that it would do me good to do a little honest 
work." He pronounced the words "honest work" 
with concentrated bitterness. 

"Probably," he went on, "Mrs. Seldom would say 
the same. I know I should be extremely unwilling to 
try and make her see how horrible to me the idea of 



90 WOOD AND STONE 

work of this kind is. She would never understand. 
She would think it was only that I wanted to remain 
a "gentleman" and not to lose caste. She would 
probably tell me that a great many gentlemen have 
worked in offices before now. I daresay they have, 
and I hope they enjoyed it! I know what these 
gentlemen-workers are, and how easy things are made 
for them. They won't be made easy for me. I can 
tell you that, Lacrimal" 

The girl drew a deep sigh, and walked slowly a few 
paces down the path, meditating, with her hands 
behind her. Presently she turned. 

"Perhaps after all," she said, "it won't be as bad 
as you fancy. I know the head-clerk in Mr. Romer's 
Yeoborough office and he is quite a nice man — alto- 
gether different from that Lickwit." 

Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard with a trembling 
hand. "Of course I knew you'd say that, Lacrima. 
You are just like the rest. You women all think, 
at the bottom of your hearts, that men are no good 
if they can't make money. I believe you have an 
idea that I ought to do what people call 'get on a 
bit in the world.' If you think that, it only shows 
how little you understand me. I have no intention of 
'getting on.' I won't 'get on'! I would sooner walk 
into Auber Lake and end the whole business!" 

The suddenness and injustice of this attack really 
did rouse the Italian to anger. "Good-bye," she said 
with a dark flash in her eyes. "I see its no use 
talking to you when you are in this mood. You 
have never, never spoken to me in that tone before. 
Good-bye! I can open the gate for myself, thank 
you." 



THE PARIAHS 91 

She walked away from him and passed out into 
the lane. He stood watching her with a queer 
haggard look on his face, his sorrowful grey eyes 
staring in front of him, as if in the presence of an 
apparition. Then, very slowly, he resumed his work, 
leaving however the fallen cabbage-leaf unnoticed on 
the ground. 

The weeds in the wheel-barrow, the straight 
banked-up lines of potatoes and lettuces, wore, as he 
returned to them, that curious air of forlorn desertion 
which is one of nature's bitterest commentaries upon 
the folly of such scenes. 

A sickening sense of emptiness took possession of 
him, and in a moment or two became unendurable. 
He flung a handful of weeds to the ground and ran 
impetuously to the gate and out into the lane. It 
was too late. A group of farm-labourers laughing 
and shouting, and driving before them a herd of 
black pigs, blocked up the road. He could not 
bring himself to pass them, thus hatless and in his 
shirt-sleeves. Besides, they must have seen the girl, 
and they would know he was pursuing her. 

He returned slowly up the path to his house, 
and — to avoid being seen by the men — entered 
his kitchen, and sat gloomily down upon a chair. 
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked with con- 
temptuous unconcern. The room had that smell 
of mortuary dust which rooms in small houses often 
acquire in the summer. He sat down once more on a 
chair, his hands upon his knees, and stared vacantly 
in front of him. A thrush outside the window was 
cracking a snail upon a stone. When the shouts of 
the men died away, this was the only sound that came 



92 WOOD AND STONE 

to him, except the continual "tick — tick — tick — 
tick" of the clock, which seemed to be occupied in 
driving nails into the heavy coffin-lid of every mortal 
joy that time had ever brought forth. 

That same night in Nevilton House was a night 
of wretched hours for Lacrima, but of hours of a 
wretchedness more active than that which made the 
hermit of Dead Man's Cottage pull the clothes over 
his head and turn his face to the wall, long ere the 
twilight had vanished from his garden. 

On leaving her friend thus abruptly, her heart full 
of angry revolt, Lacrima had seen the crowd of men 
and animals approaching, and to escape them had 
scrambled into a field on the border of the road. 
Following a little path which led across it, and cross- 
ing two more meadows, she flung herself down under 
the shadow of some great elms, in a sort of grassy 
hollow beneath an over-grown hedge, and gave full 
vent to her grief. The hollow in which she hid 
herself was a secluded and lonely spot, and no sound 
reached her but the monotonous summer-murmur of 
the flies and the rustle of the wind-troubled branches. 
Lying thus, prone on her face, her broad-brimmed hat 
with its poppy-trimmings thrown down at her side, 
and her limbs trembling with the violence of her 
sobs, Lacrima seemed to insert into that alien land- 
scape an element of passionate feeling quite foreign 
to its sluggish fertility. Not alien to the spot, how- 
ever, was another human form, that at the same hour 
had been led to wander among those lush meadows. 

The field behind the high bank and thick-set hedge 
which overshadowed the unhappy girl, was a large 
and spacious one, "put up," as country people say, 



THE PARIAHS 93 

"for hay," but as yet untouched by the mowers' 
machines. Here, in the heat of the noon, walked the 
acquisitive Mr. John Goring, calculating the value of 
this crop of grass, and deciding upon the appropriate 
date of its cutting. 

What curious irony is it, in the blind march of 
events, which so frequently draws to the place of our 
exclusive sorrow the one particular spectator that we 
would most avoid? One talks lightly of coincidence 
and of chance; but who that has walked through life 
observingly has not been driven to pause with sad 
questioning before accidents and occurrences that 
seem as though some conscious malignity in things 
had arranged them? Are there, perhaps, actual tele- 
pathic vibrations at work about us, drawing the 
hunter to his prey — the prey to the hunter? Is 
the innocent object of persecution, hiding from its 
persecutors, compelled by a fatal psychic law — the 
law of its own terror — to call subconsciously upon 
the very power it is fleeing from; to betray, against 
its will, the path of its own retreat? Lacrima in any 
case, as she lay thus prostrate, her poppy-trimmed 
hat beside her, and her brown curls flecked with spots 
of sun and shadow, brought into that English land- 
scape a strangely remote touch, — a touch of tragic 
and passionate colour. A sweet bruised exile, she 
seemed, from another region, flung down, among all 
this umbrageous rankness, to droop like a trans- 
planted flower. Certainly the sinister magic, what- 
ever it was, that had drawn Mr. Goring in that fatal 
direction, was a magic compounded of the attraction 
of contrary elements. 

If Mr. Romer represented the occult power of the 



94 WOOD AND STONE 

sandstone hill, his brother-in-law was the very 
epitome and culmination of the valley's inert clay. 
The man breathed clay, looked clay, smelt clay, 
understood clay, exploited clay, and in a literal sense 
was clay. 

If there is any truth in the scientific formula 
about the "survival" of those most "adapted" to 
their "environment," Mr. Goring was sure of a 
prolonged and triumphant sojourn on this mortal 
globe. For his "environment" was certainly one of 
clay — and to clay he certainly was most prosper- 
ously "adapted." 

It was not long before the tragic sobs of the un- 
happy Lacrima, borne across the field on the east- 
wind, arrested the farmer's attention. He stood still, 
and listened, snuffing the air, like a great jungle-boar. 
Then with rapid but furtive steps he crossed over to 
where the sound proceeded, and slipping down 
cautiously through a gap in the hedge, made his way 
towards the secluded hollow, breathing heavily like 
an animal on a trail. 

Her fit of crying having subsided, Lacrima turned 
round on her back, and remained motionless, gazing 
up at the blue sky. Extended thus on the ruffled 
grass, her little fingers nervously plucking at its roots 
and her breast still heaving, the young girl offered a 
pitiful enough picture to any casual intruder. Slight 
and fragile though she was, the softness and charm of 
her figure witnessed to her Latin origin. With her 
dusky curls and olive complexion, she might, but for 
her English dress, have been taken for a strayed 
gipsy, recovering from some passionate quarrel with 
her Romany lover. 



THE PARIAHS 95 

"What's the matter, Miss Lacrima?" was the 
farmer's greeting as his gross form obtruded itself 
against the sky-line. 

The girl started violently, and scrambled rapidly 
to her feet. Mr. Goring stepped awkwardly down 
the grassy slope and held out his hand. 

"Good morning," he said without removing his hat. 
"I should have thought 'twas time for you to be up 
at the House. 'Tis past a quarter of one." 

"I was just resting," stammered the girl. "I hope 
I have not hurt your grass." She looked apprehen- 
sively down at the pathetic imprint on the ground. 

"No, no! Missie," said the man. "That's nothing. 
'Tis hard to cut, in a place like this. Maybe they'll 
let it alone. Besides, this field ain't for hay. The 
cows will be in here tomorrow." 

Lacrima looked at the watch on her wrist. 

"Yes, you are right," she said. "I am late. I 
must be running back. Your brother does not like 
our being out when he comes in to lunch." She 
picked up her hat and made as if she would pass him. 
But he barred her way. 

"Not so quick, lassie, not so quick," he said. 
"Those that come into farmers' fields must not 
be too proud to pass the time of day with the 
farmer." 

As he spoke he permitted his little voracious pig's 
eyes to devour her with an amorous leer. All manner 
of curious thoughts passed through his head. It was 
only yesterday that his brother-in-law had been talk- 
ing to him of this girl. Certainly it would be ex- 
tremely satisfactory to be the complete master of 
that supple, shrinking figure, and of that frightened 



96 WOOD AND STONE 

little bosom, that rose and fell now, like the heart of 
a panting hare. 

After all, she was only a sort of superior serv- 
ant, and with servants of every kind the manner of 
the rapacious Mr. Goring was alternately brutal and 
endearing. Encouraged by the isolation of the spot 
and the shrinking alarm of the girl, he advanced still 
nearer and laid a heavy hand upon her shoulder. 

"Come, little wench," he said, "I will answer for it 
if you're late, up at the House. Sit down a bit with 
me, and let's make ourselves nice and comfortable." 

Lacrima trembled with terror. She was afraid to 
push him away, and try to scramble out of the 
hollow, lest in doing so she should put herself still 
further at his mercy. She wondered if anyone in the 
road would hear if she screamed aloud. Her quick 
Latin brain resorted mechanically to a diplomatic 
subterfuge. "What kind of field have you got over 
that hedge?" she asked, with a quiver in her voice. 

"A very nice field for hay, my dear," replied the 
farmer, removing his hand from her shoulder and 
thinking in his heart that these foreign girls were 
wonderfully easy to manage. 

"I'll show it to you if you like. There's a pretty 
little place for people like you and me to have a chat 
in, up along over there." He pointed through the 
hedge to a small copse of larches that grew green and 
thick at the corner of the hay-field. 

She let him give her his hand and pull her out of 
the hollow. Quite passively, too, she followed him, 
as he sought the easiest spot through which he might 
help her to surmount the difficulties of the intervening 
hedge. 



THE PARIAHS 97 

When he had at last decided upon the place, 
"Go first, please, Mr. Goring," she murmured, 
"and then you can pull me up." 

He turned his back upon her and began laboriously 
ascending the bank, dragging himself forward by the 
aid of roots and ferns. It had been easy enough to 
slide down this declivity. It was much less easy to 
climb up. At length, however, stung by nettles and 
pricked by thorns, and with earth in his mouth, he 
swung himself round at the top, ready to help her to 
follow him. 

A vigorous oath escaped his lips. She was al- 
ready a third of the way across the field, running 
madly and desperately, towards the gate into 
the lane. 

Mr. Goring shook his fist after her retreating fig- 
ure. "All right, Missie," he muttered aloud, "all 
right! If you had been kind to the poor farmer, 
he might have let you off. But now" — and he dug 
his stick viciously into the earth — "There'll be no 
dilly-dallying or nonsense about this business. I'll 
tell Romer I'm ready for this marriage-affair as soon 
as he likes. I'll teach you — my pretty darling!" 

That night the massive Leonian masonry of Nevil- 
ton House seemed especially heavy and antipathetic 
to the child of the Apennines, as it rose, somnolent 
and oppressive about her, in the hot midsummer air. 

In their spacious rooms, looking out upon the east 
court with its dove-cotes and herbacious borders, 
the two girls were awake and together. 

The wind had fallen, and the silence about the 
place was as oppressive to Lacrima's mind as the 
shadow of some colossal raven's wing. 



98 WOOD AND STONE 

The door which separated their chambers was 
ajar, and Gladys, her yellow hair loose upon her 
shoulders, had flung herself negligently down in a 
deep wicker-chair at the side of her companion's bed. 

The luckless Pariah, her brown curls tied back 
from her pale forehead by a dark ribbon, was lying 
supine upon her pillows with a look of troubled terror 
in her wide-open eyes. One long thin arm lay upon 
the coverlet, the fingers tightened upon an open book. 

At the beginning of her "visit" to Nevilton House 
she had clung desperately to these precious night- 
hours, when the great establishment was asleep; 
and she had even been so audacious as to draw the 
bolt of the door which separated her from her cousin. 
But that wilful young tyrant had pretended to her 
mother that she often "got frightened" in the night, 
so orders had gone out that the offending bolt should 
be removed. 

After this, Gladys had her associate quite at 
her mercy, and the occasions were rare when the 
pleasure of being allowed to read herself to sleep 
was permitted to the younger girl. 

It was curiously irritating to the yellow-haired 
despot to observe the pleasure which Lacrima de- 
rived from these solitary readings. Gladys got into 
the habit of chattering on, far into the night, so as 
to make sure that, when she did retire, her cousin 
would be too weary to do anything but fall asleep. 

As the two girls lay thus side by side, the one in 
her chair, and the other in her bed, under the weight 
of the night's sombre expectancy, the contrast be- 
tween them was emphasized to a fine dramatic point. 
The large-winged bat that fluttered every now and 



THE PARIAHS 99 

then across the window might have caught, if for a 
brief moment it could have been endowed with 
human vision, a strange sense of the tragic power 
of one human being over another, when the restriction 
of a common roof compels their propinquity. 

One sometimes seeks to delude oneself in the fond 
belief that our European domestic hearths are places 
of peace and freedom, compared with the dark haunts 
of savagery in remoter lands. It is not true! The 
long-evolved system that, with us, groups together, 
under one common authority, beings as widely 
sundered as the poles, is a system that, for all its 
external charm, conceals, more often than anyone 
could suppose, subtle and gloomy secrets, as dark and 
heathen as any in those less favoured spots. 

The nervous organization of many frail human ani- 
mals is such that the mere fact of being compelled, 
out of custom and usage and economic helplessness, 
to live in close relation with others, is itself a tragic 
purgatory. 

It is often airily assumed that the obstinate and 
terrible struggles of life are encountered abroad — 
far from home — in desolate contention with the 
elements or with enemies. It is not so! The most 
obstinate and desperate struggles of all — struggles 
for the preservation of one's most sacred identity, of 
one's inmost liberty of action and feeling — take 
place, and have their advances and retreats, their 
treacheries and their betrayals, under the hypocritical 
calm of the domestic roof. Those who passionately 
resent any agitation, any free thought, any legislative 
interference, which might cause these fortresses of 
seclusion to enlarge their boundaries, forget, in their 



100 WOOD AND STONE 

poetic idealization of the Gods of the Hearth, that 
tragedies are often enacted under that fair consecra- 
tion which would dim the sinister repute of Argos or 
of Thebes. The Platonic speculations which, all 
through human history, have erected their fanciful 
protests against these perils, may often be unscientific 
and ill-considered. But there is a smouldering pas- 
sion of heroic revolt behind such dreams, which it is 
not always wise to overlook. 

As these two girls, the fair-haired and the dark- 
haired, let the solemn burden of the night thus press 
unheeded upon them, they would have needed no 
fantastic imagination, in an invisible observer, to be 
aware of the tense vibration between them of some 
formidable spiritual encounter. 

High up above the mass of Leonian stone which 
we have named Nevilton House, the Milky Way 
trailed its mystery of far-off brightness across the 
incredible gulfs. What to it was the fact that one 
human heart should tremble like a captured bird in 
the remorseless power of another? 

It was not to this indifferent sky, stretched equally 
over all, that hands could be lifted. And yet the 
scene between the girls must have appeared, to such 
an invisible watcher, as linked to a dramatic contest 
above and beyond their immediate human person- 
alities. 

In this quiet room the "Two Mythologies" were 
grappling; each drawing its strength from forces of an 
origin as baffling to reason as the very immensity of 
those spaces above, so indifferent to both! 

The hatred that Gladys bore to Lacrima's enjoy- 
ment of her midnight readings was a characteristic 



THE PARIAHS 101 

indication of the relations between the girls. It is 
always infuriating to a well-constituted nature to 
observe these little pathetic devices of pleasure in 
a person who has no firm grip upon life. It excites 
the same healthy annoyance as when one sees some 
absurd animal that ought, properly speaking, not to 
be alive at all, deriving ridiculous satisfaction from 
some fantastic movement incredible to sound senses. 

The Pariah had, as a matter of fact, defeated her 
healthy-minded cousin by using one of those sly 
tricks which Pariahs alone indulge in; and had 
craftily acquired the habit of slipping away earlier 
to her room, and snatching little oases of solitary 
happiness before the imperious young woman came 
upstairs. It was in revenge for these evasions that 
Gladys was even now announcing to her companion 
a new and calculated outrage upon her slave's peace 
of mind. 

Every Pariah has some especial and peculiar dread, 
— some nervous mania. Lacrima had several in- 
nate terrors. The strongest of all was a shuddering 
dread of the supernatural. Next to this, what she 
most feared was the idea of deep cold water. Lakes, 
rivers, and chilly inland streams, always rather 
alarmed than inspired her. The thought of mill- 
ponds, as they eddied and gurgled in the darkness, 
often came to her as a supreme fear, and the image 
of indrawn dark waters, sucked down beneath weirs 
and dams, was a thing she could not contemplate 
without trembling. It was no doubt the Genoese 
blood in her, crying aloud for the warm blue waves 
of the Mediterranean and shrinking from the chill 
of our English ditches, that accounted for this peculi- 



102 WOOD AND STONE 

arity. The poor child had done her best to conceal 
her feeling, but Gladys, alert as all healthy minded 
people are, to seize upon the silly terrors of the ill- 
constituted, had not let it pass unobserved, and was 
now serenely prepared to make good use of it, as a 
heaven-sent opportunity for revenge. 

It must be noted, that in the centre of the north 
garden of Nevilton House, surrounded by cypress- 
bordered lawns and encircled by a low hedge of care- 
fully clipped rosemary, was a deep round pond. 

This pond, built entirely of Leonian stone, lent 
itself to the playing of a splendid fountain — a foun- 
tain which projected from an ornamental island, 
covered with overhanging ferns. 

The fountain only played on state occasions, and 
the coolness and depth of the water, combined with 
the fact that the pond had a stone bottom, gave the 
place admirable possibilities for bathing. Gladys her- 
self, full of animal courage and buoyant energy, had 
made a custom during the recent hot weather of 
rising from her bed early in the morning, before the 
servants were up, and enjoying a matutinal plunge. 

She was a practised swimmer and had been lately 
learning to dive; and the sensation of slipping out 
of the silent house, garbed in a bathing-dress, with 
sandals on her feet, and an opera-cloak over her 
shoulders, was thrilling to every nerve of her healthy 
young body. Impervious animal as she was, she 
would hardly have been human if those dew-drenched 
lawns and exquisite morning odours had not at least 
crossed the margin of her consciousness. She had 
hitherto been satisfied with a proud sense of superi- 
ority over her timid companion, and Lacrima so far, 



THE PARIAHS 103 

had been undisturbed by these excursions, except in 
the welcoming of her cousin on her return, dripping 
and laughing, and full of whimsical stories of how 
she had peeped down over the terrace-wall, and seen 
the milk-men, in the field below, driving in their 
cattle. 

Looking about, however, in her deliberate feline 
way, for some method of pleasant revenge, she had 
suddenly hit upon this bathing adventure as a heaven- 
inspired opportunity. The thought of it when it 
first came to her as she languidly sunned herself, 
like a great cat, on the hot parapet of the pond, had 
made her positively laugh for joy. She would compel 
her cousin to accompany her on these occasions! 

Lacrima was not only terrified of water, but was 
abnormally reluctant and shy with regard to any risk 
of being observed in strange or unusual garments. 

Gladys had stretched herself out on the Leonian 
margin of the pond with a thrilling sense of delight 
at the prospect thus offered. She would be able to 
gratify, at one and the same time, her profound need 
to excel in the presence of an inferior, and her in- 
satiable craving to outrage that inferior's reserve. 

The sun-warmed slabs of Leonian stone, upon which 
she had so often basked in voluptuous contentment 
seemed dumbly to encourage and stimulate her in 
this heathen design. How entirely they were the 
accomplices of all that was dominant in her destiny 
— these yellow blocks of stone that had so enriched 
her house! They answered to her own blond beauty, 
to her own sluggish remorselessness. She loved their 
tawny colour, their sandy texture, their enduring 
strength. She loved to see them around and about 



104 WOOD AND STONE 

her, built into walls, courts, terraces and roofs. They 
gave support and weight to all her pretensions. 

Thus it had been with an almost mystical thrill of 
exultation that she had felt the warmth of the Leo- 
nian slabs caress her limbs, as this new and exciting 
scheme passed through her mind. 

And now, luxuriously seated in her low chair by 
her friend's side she was beginning to taste the 
reward of her inspiration. 

"Yes," she said, crossing her hands negligently 
over her knees, "it is so dull bathing alone. I really 
think you'll have to do it with me, dear! You'll 
like it all right when once you begin. It is only the 
effort of starting. The water isn't so very cold, and 
where the sun warms the parapet it is lovely." 

"I can't, Gladys," pleaded the other, from her 
bed, "I can't — I can't!" 

"Nonsense, child. Don't be so silly! I tell you, 
you'll enjoy it. Besides, there's nothing like bathing 
to keep one healthy. Mother was only saying last 
night to father how much she wished you would 
begin it." 

Lacrima's fingers let her book slip through them. It 
slid down unnoticed upon the floor and lay open there. 

She sat up and faced her cousin. 

"Gladys," she said, with grave intensity, "if you 
make your mother insist on my doing this, you are 
more wicked than I ever dreamed you would be." 

Gladys regarded her with indolent interest. 

"Its only at first the water feels cold," she said. 
"You get used to it, after the first dip. I always 
race round the lawn afterwards, to get warm. What's 
the matter now, baby?" 



THE PARIAHS 105 

These final words were due to the fact that the 
Pariah had suddenly put up her hands to her face 
and was shaking with sobs. Gladys rose and bent 
over her. "Silly child," she said, "must I kiss its 
tears away? Must I pet it and cosset it?" 

She pulled impatiently at the resisting fingers, and 
loosening them, after a struggle, did actually go so 
far as to touch the girl's cheek with her lips. Then 
sinking back into her chair she resumed her inter- 
rupted discourse. 

The taste of salt tears had not, it seemed, softened 
her into any weak compliance. Really strong and 
healthy natures learn the art, by degrees, of proving 
adamant, to the insidious cunning of these persuasions. 

"Girls of our class," she announced sententiously, 
"must set the lower orders in England an example 
of hardiness. Father says it is dreadful how effem- 
inate the labouring people are becoming. They are 
afraid of work, afraid of fresh air, afraid of cold 
water, afraid of discipline. They only think of getting 
more to eat and drink." 

The Pariah turned her face to the wall and lay 
motionless, contemplating the cracks and crevices in 
the oak panelling. 

Under the same indifferent stars the other Pariah 
of Nevilton was also staring hopelessly at the wall. 
What secrets these impassive surfaces, near the pil- 
lows of sleepers, could reveal, if they could only 
speak! 

"Father says that what we all want is more 
physical training," Gladys went on. "This next 
winter you and I must do some practising in the 
Yeoborough Gymnasium. It is our superior physical 



106 WOOD AND STONE 

training, father says, which enables us to hold the 
mob in check. Just look at these workmen and 
peasants, how clumsily they slouch about!" 

Lacrima turned round at this. "Your father and 
his friends are shamefully hard on their workmen. 
I wish they would strike again!" 

Gladys smiled complacently. The scene was really 
beginning to surpass even what she had hoped. 

"Why are you such a baby, Lacrima?" she said. 
"Stop a moment. I will show you the things you 
shall wear." 

She glided off into her own room, and presently 
returned with a child's bathing dress. 

"Look, dear! Isn't it lucky? I've had these in 
my wardwobe ever since we were at Eastbourne, 
years and years ago. They will not be a bit too 
small for you. Or if they are — it doesn't matter. 
No one will see us. And I'll lend you my mackintosh 
to go out in." 

Lacrima's head sank back upon her pillows and she 
stared at her cousin with a look of helpless terror. 

"You needn't look so horrified, you silly little 
thing. There's nothing to be afraid of. Besides, 
people oughtn't to give way to their feelings. They 
ought to be brave and show spirit. It's lucky for 
you you did come to us. There's no knowing what 
a cowardly little thing you'd have grown into, if 
you hadn't. Mother is quite right. It will do you 
ever so much good to bathe with me. You can't 
be drowned, you know. The water isn't out of your 
depth anywhere. Father says every girl in England 
ought to learn to swim, so as to be able to rescue 
people. He says that this is the great new idea of 



THE PARIAHS 107 

the Empire — that we should all join in making the 
race braver and stronger. You are English now, you 
know — not Italian any more. I am going to take 
fencing lessons soon. Father says you never can tell 
what may happen, and we ought all to be prepared." 

Lacrima did not speak. A vision of a fierce aggres- 
sive crowd of hard, hostile, healthy young persons, 
drilling, riding, shooting, fencing, and dragging such 
renegades as herself remorselessly along with them, 
blocked every vista of her mind. 

"I hate the Empire!" she cried at last. Gladys 
had subsided once more into her chair — the little 
bathing-suit, symbol of our natural supremacy, 
clasped fondly in her lap. 

"I know," she said, "where you get your socialistic 
nonsense from. Yes, I do! You needn't shake your 
head. You get it from Maurice Quincunx." 

"I don't get it from anybody," protested the 
Pariah; and then, in a weak murmur, "it grows up 
naturally, in my heart." 

"What is that you're saying?" cried Gladys. 
"Sometimes I think you are really not right in your 
mind. You mutter so. You mutter, and talk to 
yourself. It irritates me more than I can say. It 
would irritate a saint." 

"I am sorry if I annoy you, cousin." 

"Annoy me? It would take more than a little 
coward like you to annoy me! But I am not going 
to argue about it. Father says arguing is only fit 
for feeble people. He says we Romers never argue. 
We think, and then we do. I'm going to bed. So 
there's your book! I hope you'll enjoy it Miss 
Socialism!" 



108 WOOD AND STONE 

She picked up the volume from the floor and flung 
it into her cousin's lap. The gesture of contempt 
with which she did this would admirably have suited 
some Roman Drusilla tossing aside the culture of 
slaves. 

An hour later the door between the two rooms 
was hesitatingly opened, and a white figure stole to 
the head of Gladys' couch. "You're not asleep, dear, 
are you? Oh Gladys, darling! Please, please, please, 
don't make me bathe with you! You don't know 
how I dread it." 

But the daughter of the Romers vouchsafed no 
reply to this appeal, beyond a drowsy "Nonsense — 
nonsense — let's only pray tomorrow will be fine." 

The night-owls, that swept, on heavy, flapping 
wings, over the village, from the tower of St. Cathar- 
ine's Church to the pinnacles of the manor, brought 
no miraculous intervention from the resting-place of 
the Holy-Rood. What was St. Catharine doing that 
she had thus deserted the sanctuary of her name? 
Perhaps the Alexandrian saint found the magic of 
the heathen hill too strong for her; or perhaps be- 
cause of its rank heresy, she had blotted her former 
shrine altogether from her tender memory. 



CHAPTER VII 

IDYLLIC PLEASURES 

MORTIMER ROMER could not be called a 
many-sided man. His dominant lust for 
power filled his life so completely that he 
had little room for excursions into the worlds of art 
or literature. He was, however, by no means narrow 
or stupid in these matters. He had at least the 
shrewdness to recognize the depth of their influence 
over other people. Indeed, as he was so constantly 
occupied with this very question of influence, with 
the problem of what precise motives and impulses 
did actually stir and drive the average mass of 
humanity, it was natural that he should, sooner or 
later, have to assume some kind of definite attitude 
towards these things. The attitude he finally hit 
upon, as most harmonious with his temperament, was 
that of active and genial patronage combined with a 
modest denial of the possession of any personal 
knowledge or taste. He recognized that an occasion 
might easily arise, when some association with the 
aesthetic world, even of this modest and external 
kind, might prove extremely useful to him. He might 
find it advisable to make use of these alien forces, 
just as Napoleon found it necessary to make use of 
religion. The fact that he himself was devoid of 
ideal emotions, whether religious or aesthetic, mat- 
tered nothing. Only fools confined their psycho- 



110 WOOD AND STONE 

logical interest within the narrow limits of their 
subjective tastes. Humanity was influenced by these 
things, and Romer was concerned with influencing 
humanity. Not that these deviations into artistic 
by-paths carried him very far. He would invite 
"cultivated" people to stay with him in his noble 
House — at least they would appreciate that ! — and 
then hand them over to the care of his charming 
daughter, a method of hospitality which, it must be 
confessed, seemed to meet with complete approval 
on the part of those concerned. Thus the name of 
the owner of Leo's Hill came to be associated, in 
many artistic and literary circles, with the names of 
such admirable and friendly patrons of these pur- 
suits, as could be counted upon for practical and 
efficient, if not for intellectual aid, in the contest 
with an unsympathetic and materialistic world. It 
was not perhaps the more struggling and less pros- 
perous artists who found him their friend. To most 
of these his attitude, though kind and attentive, was 
hardly cordial. He knew too little of the questions 
at issue, to risk giving his support to the Pariahs 
and Anarchists of Art. It was among the well-known 
and the successful that Mr. Romer's patronage was 
most evident. Success was a quality he admired in 
every field; and while, as has been hinted, his per- 
sonal taste remained quite untouched, he was clever 
enough to pick up the more fashionable catch- 
words of current criticism, and to use them, when 
occasion served, with effective naturalness and ap- 
parent conviction. 

Among other celebrities or semi-celebrities, across 
whose track he came, while on his periodic visits to 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 1 11 

London, was a certain Ralph Dangelis, an American 
artist, whose masterly and audacious work was just 
then coming into vogue. True to his imperial instinct 
of surrounding himself with brilliant and prosperous 
clients, if such they could be called, he promptly 
invited the famous Westerner to come down and 
stay with him in Nevilton. 

The American, who knew nothing of English 
country life, and was an impassioned and desperate 
pursuer of all new experiences, accepted this invita- 
tion, and appeared, among the quiet Somersetshire 
orchards, like a bolt from the blue; falling into the 
very centre of the small quaintly involved drama, 
whose acts and scenes we are now recording. Thus 
plunged into a completely new circle the distinguished 
adventurer very soon made himself most felicitously 
at home. He was of a frank and friendly disposition; 
at heart an obdurate and impenetrable egoist, but on 
the surface affable and kind to a quite exceptional 
degree. He had spent several years in both Paris 
and Rome, and hence it was in his power to adapt 
himself easily and naturally to European, if not to 
English ways. One result of his protracted visits 
to foreign cities was the faculty of casting off at 
pleasure his native accent — the accent of a citizen 
of Toledo, Ohio. He did not always do this. Some- 
times it was his humour, especially in intercourse with 
ladies, to revert to most free and fearless provincial- 
isms, and a certain boyish gaiety in him made him 
mischievously addicted to use such expressions when 
they seemed least of all acceptable, but under normal 
conditions it would have been difficult to gather from 
the tone of his language that he was anything but 



112 WOOD AND STONE 

an extremely well-travelled gentleman of Anglo- 
Saxon birth. He speedily made a fast friend of 
Gladys, who found his airy persiflage and elaborate 
courtesy eminently to her liking; and as the long 
summer days succeeded one another and brought the 
visitor into more and more familiar relation with 
Nevilton ways and customs, it seemed as though his 
sojourn in that peaceful retreat was likely to be in- 
definitely prolonged. It may be well believed that 
their guest's attraction to Gladys did not escape 
the notice of the girl's parents. Mr. Romer took 
the trouble to make sundry investigations as to the 
status of Mr. Dangelis in his native Ohio; and it 
was with unmixed satisfaction that both he and his 
wife received the intelligence that he was the son 
and the only son of one of Toledo's most "promi- 
nent" citizens, a gentleman actively and effectively 
engaged in furthering the progress of civilization by 
the manufacturing of automobiles. Dangelis was, 
indeed, a prospective, if not an actual, millionaire, 
and, from all that could be learned, it appeared that 
the prominent citizen of Toledo handed over to his 
son an annual allowance equal to the income of 
many crowned heads. 

The Pariah of Nevilton House — the luckless child 
of the Apennines — found little to admire in this 
energetic wanderer. His oratorical manner, his 
abrupt, aggressive courtesies, his exuberant high 
spirits, the sweep and swing of his vigorous person- 
ality, the extraordinary mixture in him of pedantry 
and gaiety, jarred upon her sensitive over-strung 
nerves. In his boyish desire to please her, hearing 
that she came from Italy, the good-natured artist 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 113 

would frequently turn the conversation round to the 
beauty and romance of that "garden of the world," 
as he was pleased to style her home; but the tone 
of these discourses increased rather than diminished 
Lacrima's obstinate reserve. He had a habit of re- 
ferring to her country as if it were a place whose 
inhabitants only existed, by a considerate dispensa- 
tion of Providence, to furnish a charming back- 
ground for certain invaluable relics of antiquity. 
These precious fragments, according to this easy 
view of things, appeared to survive, together with 
their appropriate guardians, solely with the object 
of enlarging and inspiring the vocarious "mentality" 
of wayfarers from London and New York. Grateful 
as Lacrima was for the respite the artist brought her 
from the despotism of her cousin, she could not 
bring herself to regard him, so far as she herself was 
concerned, with anything but extreme reserve and 
caution. 

One peculiarity he displayed, filled her with shy 
dismay. Dangelis had a trick of staring at the people 
with whom he associated, as if with a kind of quiz- 
zical analysis. He threw her into a turmoil of 
wretched embarrassment by some of his glances. 
She was troubled and frightened, without being able 
to get at the secret of her agitation. Sometimes she 
fancied that he was wondering what he could make 
of her as a model. The idea that anything of this 
kind should be expected of her filled her with nervous 
dread. At other times the wild idea passed through 
her brain that he was making covert overtures to 
her, of an amorous character. She thought she inter- 
cepted once or twice a look upon his face of the 



114 WOOD AND STONE 

particular kind which always filled her with shrink- 
ing apprehension. This illusion — if it were an illu- 
sion — was far more alarming than any tendency he 
might display to pounce on her for aesthetic purposes; 
for the Pariah's association with the inhabitants of 
Nevilton House had not given her a pleasing impres- 
sion of human amorousness. 

Shortly after Dangelis' arrival, Mr. Romer found 
it necessary to visit London again for a few days; 
and the artist was rather relieved than otherwise by 
his departure. He felt freer, and more at liberty 
to express his ideas, when left alone with the three 
women. For himself, however varied their attitude 
to him might be, he found them all, in their different 
ways, full of stimulating interest. With Mrs. Romer 
he soon became perfectly at home; and discovered a 
mischievous and profane pleasure in the process of 
exciting and encouraging all her least lady-like char- 
acteristics. He would follow her into the spacious 
Nevilton kitchens, where the good lady was much more 
at home than in her stately drawing room; and watch 
with unconventional interest her rambling domestic 
colloquies with Mrs. Murphy the housekeeper, Jane 
the cook, and Lily the house-maid. 

The men-servants, of whom Mr. Romer kept two, 
always avoided, with scrupulous refinement, these 
unusual gatherings. They discoursed, in the pantry, 
upon their mistress' dubious behavior, and came to 
the conclusion that she was no more of a "real lady" 
than her visitor from America was a "real gentle- 
man." 

Dangelis made some new and amazing discovery 
in Susan Romer's character every day. In all his 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 115 

experiences from San Francisco to New York, and 
from Paris to Vienna, he had never encountered 
anything in the least resembling her. 

He could never make out how deep her apparent 
simplicity went, nor how ingrained and innate was 
her lethargic submission to circumstances. Nothing 
in the woman shocked him; neither her vulgarity 
nor her grossness. And as for her sly, sleepy, feline 
malice, he loved to excite and provoke it, as he would 
have loved to have excited a slumbering animal in a 
cage. He delighted in the way she wrinkled up her 
eyes. He delighted in the way she smacked her lips 
over her food. He loved watching her settling her- 
self to sleep in her high-backed Sheraton chair in 
the kitchen, or in her more modern lounge in the 
great entrance hall. He never grew tired of asking 
her questions about the various personages of Nevil- 
ton, their relation to Mr. Romer, and Mr. Romer's 
relation to them. He used to watch her sometimes, 
as in drowsy sensual enjoyment she would bask in 
the hot sunshine on the terrace, or drift in her slow 
stealthy manner about the garden-paths, as if she 
were a great fascinating tame puma. He made end- 
less sketches of her, in his little note-books, some of 
them of the most fantastic, and even Rabelaisean 
character. He had certainly never anticipated just 
this, when he accepted the shrewd financier's invita- 
tion to his Elizabethan home. And if Susan Romer 
delighted him, Gladys Romer absolutely bewitched 
him. He treated her as if she were no grown-up 
young lady, but a romping and quite unscrupulous 
child; and the wily Gladys, quickly perceiving how 
greatly he was pleased by any naive display of youth- 



116 WOOD AND STONE 

ful malice, or greed, or sensuality, or vanity, took good 
care to put no rein upon herself in the expression of 
her primitive emotions. 

It was with Lacrima that Ralph Dangelis found him- 
self on ground that was less secure, but in the genial 
aplomb of his all-embracing good-fellowships, it was 
only by degrees that he became conscious even of this. 
He found the place not only extraordinarily harmoni- 
ous to his general temper, but extremely inspiring to 
his imaginative work. It only needed the securing of 
a few mechanical contrivances, a studio, for instance, 
with a north-light, to have made his sojourn at Nevil- 
ton one of the most prolific summers, in regard to 
his art, that he had experienced since his student days 
in Rome. He began vaguely to wish in the depths 
of his mind that it were possible for these good 
Romers to bestow upon him in perpetuity some 
pleasant airy chamber in their great house, so that he 
might not have to lose, for many summers to come, 
these agreeable and scandalous gossippings with the 
mother and these still more agreeable flirtations with 
the delicious daughter. This bold and fantastic idea 
was less a fabric of airy speculation than might have 
been supposed; for if the American was enchanted 
with his entertainers, his entertainers, at any rate the 
mother and the daughter, were extremely well pleased 
with him. The free sweep of his capacious sympathy, 
the absence in him of any punctilious gentility, the 
large and benignant atmosphere he diffused round 
him, and the mixture of cynical realism with con- 
siderate chivalry, were things so different from any- 
thing they had been accustomed to, that they both 
of them would willingly have offered him a suite of 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 117 

apartments in the house, if he could have accepted 
such an offer. 

Dangelis was particularly lucky in arriving at 
Nevilton at this especial moment. An abnormally 
retarded spring had led to the most delicious over- 
lapping in the varied flora of the place. Though June 
had begun, there were still many flowers lingering in 
the shadier spots of the woods and ditches, which 
properly belonged not only to May, but to very 
early May. Certain, even, of April's progeny had 
not completely faded from the late-flowering lanes. 

The artist found himself surrounded by a riotous 
revel of leafy exuberance. The year's "primal burst" 
had occurred, not in reluctant spasmodic fits and 
starts, as is usual in our intermittent fine weather, 
but in a grand universal outpouring of the earth's 
sap. His imagination answered spontaneously to 
this appeal, and his note-books were speedily filled 
with hurried passionate sketches, made at all hours 
of the long bright days, and full of suggestive charm. 
One particularly lovely afternoon the American found 
himself wandering slowly up the hill from the little 
Nevilton station, after a brief excursion to Yeoborough 
in search of pigments and canvas. He was hoping 
to take advantage of this auspicious stirring of his 
imaginative senses, by entering upon some more 
important and more continuous work. The Nevilton 
ladies had assured him that it would be quite impos- 
sible to find in the little town the kind of materials he 
needed; and he was returning in high spirits to assure 
them that he had completely falsified their prediction. 
He suspected Gladys of having invented this difficulty 
with a view to confining his labours to such easily 



118 WOOD AND STONE 

shared sketching-trips as she might accompany him 
upon, but though the fascination of the romping and 
toying girl still retained, and had even increased, its 
power over him; he was, in this case, impelled and 
driven by a force stronger and more dominant than 
any sensual attraction. He was in a better mood for 
painting than he had ever been in his life, and nothing 
could interfere with his resolution to exploit this mood 
to its utmost limit. With the most precious of his 
newly purchased materials under his arm and the more 
bulky ones promised him that same evening, Dangelis, 
as he drifted slowly up the sunny road chatting 
amicably with such rural marketers as overtook him, 
felt in a peculiarly harmonious temper. 

He had recently, in the western cities of the States, 
won a certain fiercely contested notoriety in the art 
of portrait-painting, an art which he had come more 
and more to practise according to the very latest 
of those daring modern theories, which are summed 
up sometimes under the not very illuminative title 
of Post-impressionism, and he had, during the last 
few days, indulged in a natural and irresistible wish 
to associate this new departure with his personal 
experiences at Nevilton. 

Gossiping nonchalantly with the village-wives, as 
he ascended the dusty road, by the vicarage wall, his 
thoughts ran swiftly over the motley-coloured map of 
his past life, and the deviating track across the world 
which he had been led to follow. He congratulated 
himself in his heart, as he indulged in easy persiflage 
with his fellow-wayfarers, upon his consistent freedom 
from everything that might choke or restrain the 
freedom of his will. 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 119 

How fortunate, how incredibly fortunate, that he 
should, in weather like this, and in so abounding a 
mood of creative energy, be completely his own 
master, except for the need of propitiating two naive 
and amusing women! He entertained himself by the 
thought of how little they really knew him, — these 
friendly Romers — how little they sounded his real 
purposes, his essential feelings! To them no doubt, 
he was no more than he was to these excellent vil- 
lagers, — a tall, fair, slouching, bony figure, with a 
face, — if they went as far as his face, — massively 
heavy and irregular, with dreamy humorous eyes and 
a mouth addicted to nervous twitching. 

A clump of dandelions, obtruding their golden 
indifference to human drama, into the dust of the 
road at his feet, mixed oddly, at that moment, in 
these obscure workings of his brain, with a sort of 
savage caress of self-complacent congratulation which 
he suddenly bestowed on his interior self; as, be- 
neath his pleasant chatter with his rural companions, 
he thought how imperturbable, how ferocious, his 
secret egoism was, and how well he concealed it 
under his indolent good-nature! He had passed now 
the entrance to the vicarage garden, and in the 
adjoining field he observed with a curious thrill of 
psychic sympathy the tenacious grip with which a 
viciously-knotted ash-tree held to the earth with 
its sturdy roots. Out-walked at last by all the other 
returned travellers, Dangelis glanced without pausing 
down the long Italianated avenue, at the end of 
which shone red, in the afternoon sun, the mullioned 
windows of the great house. He preferred to prolong 
his stroll, by taking the circuitous way, round by the 



120 WOOD AND STONE 

village. He knew the expression of that famous 
west front too well now, to linger in admiration over 
its picturesque repose in the afternoon sunshine. 
As a matter of fact a slight chill of curious antipathy 
crossed his consciousness as he quickened his steps. 

Happily situated though he was, in his pleasant 
lodging beneath that capacious roof, the famous 
edifice itself had not altogether won his affection. The 
thing suggested to his wayward and prairie-nurtured 
soul, a stately product rather of convention than of 
life. He felt oddly conscious of it as something sym- 
bolic of what would be always intrinsically opposed 
to him, of what would willingly, if it were able, sup- 
press him and render him helpless. 

Dangelis belonged to quite a different type of 
trans-Atlantic visitor, from the kind that hover with 
exuberant delight over everything that is "old" or 
"English" or "European." He was essentially rather 
an artist than an antiquary, rather an energetic 
workman than an epicurean sentimentalist. Once out 
of sight of the Elizabethan pile, the curious chill 
passed from his mind, and as he approached the first 
cottages of the village he looked round for more 
reassuring tokens. Such tokens were not lacking. 
They crowded in upon him, indeed, from every side. 
Stopping for a moment, ere the houses actually 
blocked his view, and leaning over a gate which 
faced westward, Dangelis looked out across the great 
Somersetshire plain, to which Leo's Hill and Nevilton 
Mount serve the office of watchful sentinels. Tall, 
closely-clipped elm-trees, bordering every field, gave 
the country on this side of the horizon, a queer arti- 
ficial look, as if it had been one huge landscape- 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 121 

garden, arranged according to the arbitrary pleasure 
of some fantastic artist, whose perversion it was to 
reduce every natural extravagance to the meticulous 
rhythm of his own formal taste. 

This impression, the impression of something willed 
and intentional in the very formation of Nature, gave 
our eccentric onlooker a caressing and delicate pleas- 
ure, a sense as of a thing peculiarly harmonious to his 
own spirit. The formality of Nevilton House de- 
pressed and chilled him, but the formality of age- 
trimmed trees and hedges liberated his imagination, 
as some perverse work of a Picasso or a Matisse might 
have done. He wondered vaguely to himself what 
was the precise cause of the psychic antipathy which 
rendered him so cold to the grandeur of Elizabethan 
architecture, while the other features of his present 
dwelling remained so attractive, and he came to the 
temporary solution, as he took his arms from the 
top of the gate, that it was because that particular 
kind of magnificence expressed the pride of a class, 
rather than of an individual, whereas he himself was 
all for individual self-assertion in everything — in 
everything! The problem was still teasing him, when, 
a few minutes later, he passed the graceful tower of 
St. Catharine's church. 

This strangely organic, this curiously anonymous 
Gothic art — was not this also, the suppression of 
the individual, in the presence of something larger 
and deeper, of something that demanded the sacri- 
fice of mere transient personality, as the very condi- 
tion of its appearance? At all events it was less 
humiliating, less of an insult, to the claims of the 
individual will, when the thing was done in the inter- 



122 WOOD AND STONE 

est of religion, than when it was done in the interests 
of a class. The impersonality of the former, re- 
sembled the impersonality of rocks and flowers; that 
of the latter, the impersonality of fashions in dress. 

"But away with them both!" muttered Dangelis 
to himself, as he strode viciously down the central 
street of Nevilton. The American was in very truth, 
and he felt he was, for all his artistic receptivity, an 
alien and a foreigner in the midst of these time-worn 
traditions. In spite of their beauty he knew himself 
profoundly opposed to them. They excited fibres of 
opposition and rebellion in him, that went down to 
the very depths of his nature. If, allowing full scope 
to our speculative fancy — and who knows upon 
what occult truths these wandering thoughts some- 
times stumble? — we image the opposing "streams of 
tendency," in Nevilton village, as focussed and summed 
up, in the form of the Gothic church, guarded by the 
consecrated Mount, and the form of the Elizabethan 
house, owned by the owner of Leo's Hill, it is clear 
that this wanderer, from the shores of the Great 
Lakes, was equally antagonistic to both of them. He 
brought into the place a certain large and elemental 
indifference. To the child of the winds and storms 
of the Great Lakes, as, so one might think, to the 
high fixed stars themselves, this local strife of opposed 
mythologies must needs appear a matter of but trifling 
importance. 

The American was not permitted, on this occasion, 
to pursue his meditations uninterrupted to the end 
of his walk. Half-way down the south drive he was 
overtaken by Gladys, returning from the village 
post-office. "Hullo! How have you got on?" she 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 123 

cried. "I suppose you'll believe me another time? 
You know now, I expect, how impossible the Yeo- 
borough shops are!" 

"On the contrary," said the artist smiling, "I have 
found them extremely good. Perhaps I am less 
exacting," he added, "than some artists." 

"I am exacting in everything," said Gladys, "es- 
pecially in people. That is why I get on so well 
with you. You are a new experience to me." 

Dangelis made no reply to this and they paced in 
silence under the tall exotic cedars until they reached 
the house. 

"There's mother!" cried the girl, pushing open the 
door that led into the kitchen premises, and pulling 
the American unceremoniously in after her. They 
found Mrs. Romer before a large oak table, set in 
the mullioned window of the house-keeper's little 
room. She was arranging flowers for the evening's 
dinner-table. The plump lady welcomed Dangelis 
effusively and made him sit down upon a Queen Anne 
settle of polished mahogany which stood in the corner 
of the fire-place. Gladys remained standing, a tall 
softly-moulded figure, appealingly girlish in her light 
muslin frock. She swayed slightly, backwards and 
forwards, pouting capriciously at her mother's naive 
discourse, and loosening her belt with both her hands. 

"Why should you ever go back to America?" Mrs. 
Romer was saying. "Don't go, dear Mr. Dangelis. 
Stay with us here till the end of the summer. The 
Red room in the south passage was getting quite 
damp before you came. Please, don't go! Gladys 
and I are getting so fond of you, so used to your 
ways and all that. Aren't we Gladys? Why should 



124 WOOD AND STONE 

you go? There are plenty of lovely bits of scenery 
about here. And you can have a studio built! Yes! 
Why not? Couldn't he, Gladys? The lumber-room in 
the south passage — opposite where Lily sleeps — 
would make a splendid place for painting in hot 
weather. I suppose a north light, though, would be 
impossible. But some kind of glass arrangement 
might be made. I must talk to Mortimer about it. 
I suppose you rich Americans think nothing of 
calling in builders and putting up studios. I suppose 
you do it everywhere. America must be full of 
north light. But perhaps something of the kind could 
be done. I really don't understand architecture, but 
Mortimer does. Mortimer understands everything. 
I daresay it wouldn't be very expensive. It would 
only mean buying the glass." 

The admirable woman, whose large fair face and 
double chin had grown quite creased and shiny 
with excitement, turned at last to her daughter who 
had been coquettishly and dreamily staring at the 
smiling artist. 

"Why don't you say something, Gladys? You don't 
want Mr. Dangelis to go, any more than I do, do 

you?" 

The girl moved to the table and picking up a large 
peony stuck it wantonly and capriciously into her 
dress. "I have my confirmation lesson tonight," 
she said. "I must be at Mr. Clavering's by six. 
What's the time now?" She looked at the clock on 
the mantel-piece. "Why, its nearly half-past four! 
I wonder where Lacrima is. Never mind! We must 
have tea without her. I'm sure Mr. Dangelis is 
dying for tea. Let's have it out on the terrace." 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 125 

"At six?" repeated Mrs. Romer. "I thought the 
class was always at seven. It was given out to be 
seven. I heard the notice on Sunday." 

Gladys looked smilingly at the American as she 
answered her mother. "Don't be silly, dear. You 
know Mr. Clavering takes me separately from the 
others. The others are all village people." 

Mrs. Romer rose from her seat with something 
between a sigh and a chuckle. "I hadn't the least 
idea," she said, "that he took you separately. You've 
been going to these classes for three weeks and you've 
never mentioned such a thing until this moment. 
Well — never mind ! I expect Mr. Dangelis will not 
object to strolling down the drive with you. You'd 
better both get ready for tea now. I'll go and tell 
somebody we want it." 

She had no sooner departed than Gladys began flick- 
ing the American, in playful childish sport, with a 
spray of early roses. He entered willingly into the 
game, and a pleasant tussle ensued between them 
as he sought to snatch the flowers out of her hands. 
She resisted but he pushed her backwards, and held 
her imprisoned against the edge of the table, teasing 
her as if she were a romping child of twelve. 

"So you are going to these classes alone, are you?" 
he said. "I see that your English clergymen are 
allowed extraordinary privileges. I expect you cause 
him a good deal of agitation, poor dear man, if you 
flirt with him as shamelessly as you do with me. 
Well, go ahead! I'm not responsible for you. In 
fact I'm all for spurring you on. It'll amuse me to 
see what happens. But no doubt all sorts of things 
have happened already! I suppose you've made Mr. 



126 WOOD AND STONE 

Clavering desperately in love with you. I expect 
you persecute him unmercifully. I know you. I 
know your ways." He playfully pinched her arm. 
"But go on. It'll be an amusement to me to watch 
the result of all this. I like being a sort of sympa- 
thetic onlooker, in these things. I like the idea of 
hiding behind the scenes, and watching the tricks of 
a naughty little flirt like you, set upon troubling the 
mind of a poor harmless minister." 

The reply made by the daughter of the House to 
this challenge was a simple but effective one. Like 
a mischievous infant caught in some unpardonable 
act, she flagrantly and shamelessly put out her 
tongue at him. Long afterwards, with curious feel- 
ings, Dangelis recalled this gesture. He associated 
it to the end of his life with the indefinable smell of 
cut flowers, with their stalks in water, and the 
pungency of peony-petals. 

Tea, when it reached our friends upon the stately 
east terrace, proved a gay and festive meal. The 
absence of the reserved and nervous Italian, and also 
of the master of Nevilton, rendered all three persons 
more completely and freely at their ease, than they 
had ever been since the American's first appearance. 
The grass was being cut at that corner of the park, 
and the fresh delicious smell, full of the very sap of 
the earth, poured in upon them across the sunny 
flower beds. The chattering of young starlings, the 
cawing of young rooks, blended pleasantly with the 
swish of the scythes and the laughter of the hay- 
makers; and from the distant village floated softly 
to their ears all those vague and characteristic sounds 
which accompany the close of a hot day, and the 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 127 

release from labour of men and beasts. As they 
devoured their bread and butter with that naive 
greediness which is part of the natural atmosphere 
of this privileged hour in an English home, the three 
friends indicated by their playful temper and gay 
discourse that they each had secret reasons for self- 
congratulation. 

Dangelis felt an exquisite sense of new possibili- 
ties in his art, drawn from the seduction of these 
surroundings and the frank animalism of his cheer- 
ful companions. He sat between them, watching 
their looks and ways, very much as Rubens or 
Franz Hals might have watched the rounded bosoms 
and spacious gestures of two admirable burgess- 
women in some country house of Holland. 

Mrs. Romer, below her garrulous chatter, nourished 
fantastic and rose-colored dreams, in which inesti- 
mable piles of dollars, and limitless rows of golden 
haired grand-children, played the predominant part. 
Gladys, flushed and excited, gave herself up to the 
imagined exercise of every sort of wanton and wilful 
power, with the desire for which the flowing sap of 
the year's exuberance filled her responsive veins. 

Tea over, Dangelis suggested that he should accom- 
pany the girl to Mr. Clavering's door. 

"You needn't be there for three quarters of an 
hour," he said, "let's go across to the mill copse 
first, and see if there are any blue-bells left." 

Gladys willingly consented, and Susan Romer, 
remaining pensive in her low cane chair, watched 
their youthful figures retreating across the sunlit 
park with a sigh of profound thankfulness addressed 
vaguely and obscurely to Omnipotence. This was 



128 WOOD AND STONE 

indeed the sort of son-in-law she craved. How much 
more desirable than that reserved and haughty young 
Ilminster! Gladys would be, three times over, a 
fool if she let him escape. 

A few minutes later the artist and his girl-friend 
reached the mill spinney. He helped her over the 
stream and the black thorn hedge without too much 
damage to her frock and he was rewarded for his 
efforts by the thrill of vibrating pleasure with which 
she plunged her hands among the oozy stalks of those 
ineffable blue flowers. 

"No wonder young Hyacinth was too beautiful 
to live," he remarked. 

"Shut up," was the young woman's reply, as she 
breathlessly stretched herself along the length of a 
fallen branch, and endeavoured to reach the damp 
moist stalks and cool leaves with her forehead and lips. 

"How silly it is, having one's hair done up," she 
cried presently, raising herself on her hands from her 
prone position, and kicking the branch viciously with 
her foot. 

"You'd have liked me with my hair dowm Mr. 
Dangelis," she continued. "Lying like this," and she 
once more embraced the fallen bough, "it would 
have got mixed up with all those blue-bells and then 
you would have had something to paint!" 

"Bad girl!" cried the artist playfully, switching 
her lightly with a willow wand from which he had 
been stripping the bark. "I would have made you 
do your hair up, tight round your head, years and 
years ago." 

He offered her his hand and lifted her up. Once in 
possession of those ardent youthful fingers, he seemed 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 129 

to consider himself justified in retaining them and, 
as the girl made no sign of dissent, they advanced 
hand in hand through the thick undergrowth. 

The place was indeed a little epitome of the sea- 
son's prolific growth. Above and about them, elder- 
bushes and hazels met in entangled profusion; while 
at their feet the marshy soil was covered with a mass 
of moss and cool-rooted leafy plants. Golden-green 
burdocks grew there, and dark dog-mercury; while 
mixed with aromatic water-mint and ground ivy, 
crowds of sturdy red campions lifted up their rose- 
coloured heads. The undergrowth was so thick, and 
the roots of the willows and alders so betraying, that 
over and over again he had to make a path for her, 
and hold back with his hand some threatening withy- 
switch or prickly thorn branch, that appeared likely 
to invade her face or body. 

The indescribable charm of the hour, as the broken 
sunlight, almost horizontal now, threw red patches, 
like the blood of wounded satyrs, upon tree-trunks 
and mossy stumps, and made the little marsh-pools 
gleam as if filled with fairy wine, found its com- 
pletest expression in the long-drawn flute-music, at 
the same time frivolously gay and exquisitely sad, of 
the blackbird's song. An angry cuckoo, crying its 
familiar cry as it flew, flapped away from some 
hidden perch, just above their heads. 

Not many more black-bird's notes and not many 
more cuckoo's cries would that diminutive jungle 
hear, before the great mid-summer silence descended 
upon it, to be broken only by the less magical 
sounds of the later season. Nothing but the aus- 
picious accident of the extreme lateness of the spring 



130 WOOD AND STONE 

had given to the visitor from Ohio these revelations 
of enchantment. It was one of those unequalled 
moments when the earth seems to breathe out from 
its most secret heart perfumes and scents that seem 
to belong to a more felicitous planet than our planet, 
murmurs and voices adapted to more responsive ears 
than our ears. 

It was doubtless, so Dangelis thought, on such an 
evening as this, that the first notion of the presence 
in such places of beings of a finer and yet a grosser 
texture than man's, first entered the imagination of 
humanity. In such a spot were the earth-gods born. 

Many feathered things, besides black-birds and 
cuckoos abounded in the mill spinney. 

They had scarcely reached the opposite end of the 
little wood, when with a sudden cry of excitement 
and a quick sinking on her knees, the girl turned to 
him with a young thrush in her hand. It was big 
enough to be capable of flying and, as she held it in 
her soft white fingers, it struggled desperately and 
uttered little cries. She held it tightly in one hand, 
and with the other caressed its ruffled feathers, 
looking sideways at her companion, as she did so, 
with dreamy, half-shut, voluptuous eyes. 

"Little darling," she whispered. And then, with 
a breathless gasp in her voice, — "Kiss its head, Mr. 
Dangelis. It can't get away." He stooped over her 
as she held the bird up to him, and if in obeying her 
he brushed with his lips fingers as well as feathers, 
the accident was not one he could bring himself to 
regret. 

"It can't get away," she repeated, in a low soft 
murmur. 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 131 

The bird did, however, get away, a moment after- 
wards, and went fluttering off through the brush- 
wood, with that delicious, awkward violence, which 
young thrushes share with so many other youthful 
things. 

In the deep ditch which they now had to cross, the 
artist caught sight of a solitary half-faded primrose, 
the very last, perhaps, of its delicate tribe. He 
showed it to Gladys, gently smoothing away, as he 
did so, the heavy leaves which seemed to be over- 
shadowing its last days of life. 

The girl pushed him aside impetuously, and plucking 
the faded flower deliberately thrust it into her mouth. 

"I love eating them," she cried, "I used to do it 
when I was ever so little and I do it still when I am 
alone. You've no idea how nice they taste!" 

At that moment they heard the sound of the church 
clock striking six. 

"Quick!" cried Gladys. "Mr. Clavering will be 
waiting. He'll be cross if I'm too dreadfully late." 

They emerged from the wood and followed the 
grass-grown lane, round by the small mill-pond. 
Crossing the park once more, they entered the vil- 
lage by the Yeoborough road. 

"What a girl!" said Dangelis to himself, in a voice 
of unmitigated admiration, as he held open for her, 
at last, the little gate of the old vicarage garden, 
and waved his good-bye. 

"What a girl! Heaven help that unfortunate Mr. 
Clavering! If he's as susceptible as most of these 
young Englishmen, she'll make havoc of his poor 
heart. Will he read the 'Imitation' with her, I 
wonder?" 



132 WOOD AND STONE 

He strolled slowly back, the way they had come, 
the personality of the insidious Gladys pressing less 
and less heavily upon him as his thought reverted 
to his painting. He resolved that he would throw all 
these recent impressions together in some large and 
sumptuous picture, that should give to these modern 
human figures something of the ample suggestion and 
noble aplomb, the secret of which seemed to have 
been lost to the world with the old Flemish and 
Venetian masters. 

What in his soul he vaguely imaged as his task, 
was an attempt to eliminate all mystic and symbolic 
attitudes from his works, and to catch, in their place, 
if the inspiration came to him, something of the 
lavish prodigality, superbly material, and yet pos- 
sessed of ineffable vistas, of the large careless evoca- 
tions of nature herself. 

His imaginative purpose, as it defined itself more 
and more clearly in his mind, during his solitary 
return through the evening light, seemed to imply an 
attempted reproduction of those aspects of the human 
drama, in such a place as this, which carried upon 
their surface the air of things that could not happen 
otherwise, and which, in their large inevitableness, 
over-brimmed and over-flowed all traditional dis- 
tinctions. He would have liked to have given, in 
this way, to the figures of Gladys and her mother, 
something of the superb non-moral "insouciance," 
springing, like the movements of animals and the 
fragrance of plants, out of the bosom of an earth 
innocent of both introspection and renunciation, which 
one observes in the forms of Attic sculpture, or in 
the creations of Venetian colourists. Below the high 



IDYLLIC PLEASURES 133 

ornamental wall of Nevilton garden he paused a 
moment before entering the little postern-gate, to 
admire the indescribable greenness and luxuriousness 
of the heavy grass devoted in this place, not to hay- 
makers but to cattle. There was a sort of poetry, 
he humorously told himself, even about the great 
black heaps of cow-dung which alternated here with 
the golden clumps of drowsy buttercups. They also, 
— why not? — might be brought into the kind of 
picture he visioned, just as Veronese brought his 
mongrels and curs to the very feet of the Saviour! 

Dangelis lifted his eyes, to where, through a gap in 
the leafy uplands, the more distant hills were visible. 
He could make out clearly, in the rich purple light, 
the long curving lines of the Corton downs, as they 
melted, little by little, in a floating lake of aerial 
blue-grey vapour, the exhalation of the great valley's 
day-long breathing. 

He could even mark, at the end of the Corton 
range — and the sight of it gave him a thrilling 
sense of the invincible continuity of life in these 
regions — the famous tree-crested circle of Cadbury 
Camp, the authentic site of the Arthurian Camelot. 

What a lodging this Nevilton was, to pass one's 
days in, to work in, and to love and dream! What 
enchantments were all around him! What memories! 
What dumb voices! 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 

JUNE, in Nevilton, that summer, seemed debarred 
by some strange interdiction from regaining its 
normal dampness and rainy discomfort. 

It continued unnaturally hot and dry — so dry, that 
though the hay-harvest was still in full session, the 
farmers were growing seriously anxious and impatient 
for the long-delayed showers. It had been, as we 
have already noted, an unusual season. Not only 
were there so many blue-bells lingering in the shadowy 
places in the woods, but among the later flowers there 
were curious over-lappings. 

The little milk-wort blossoms, for instance, on Leo's 
Hill, were overtaken, before they perished, by prema- 
ture out-croppings of yellow trefoil and purple thyme. 

The walnut-trees had still something left of their 
spring freshness, while in the hedges along the roads, 
covered, all of them, with a soft coating of thin 
white dust, the wild-roses and the feathery grasses 
suggested the heart of the year's prime. 

It was about eight o'clock, in the evening of a day 
towards the end of the second week in this unusual 
month, that Mr. Hugh Clavering emerged from the 
entrance of the Old Vicarage with a concentrated 
and brooding expression. His heart was indeed rent 
and torn within him by opposite and contrary emo- 
tions. With one portion of his sensitive nature he 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 135 

was craving desperately for the next day's interview 
with Gladys; with the other portion he was making 
firm and drastic resolutions to avoid it and escape 
from it. She was due to come to his house in the 
afternoon — less than twenty-four hours' time from 
this actual moment! But the more rigorous half of 
his being had formed the austere plan of sending her 
a note in the morning begging her to appear, along 
with the other candidates, at a later hour. He had 
written the note and it still remained, propped up 
against the little Arundel print of the Transfiguration, 
on the mantelpiece of his room. 

He went up the street with bowed, absorbed head, 
hardly noticing the salutations of the easy loiterers 
gathered outside the door of the Goat and Boy, — 
the one of Nevilton's two taverns which just at 
present attracted the most custom. Passing between 
the tavern and the churchyard wall, he pushed open 
the gate leading into the priory farmyard, and 
striding hurriedly through it began the ascent of 
the grassy slope at the base of Nevilton Mount. 

The wind had sunk with the sinking of the sun, and 
an immense quietness lay like a catafalque of sacred 
interposition on the fields and roofs and orchards of 
the valley. A delicious smell of new-mown grass 
blent itself with the heavy perfume of the great white 
blossoms of the elder bushes — held out, like so many 
consecrated chalices to catch the last drops of soft- 
lingering light, before it faded away. 

Hugh Clavering went over the impending situation 
again and again; first from one point of view, then 
from another. The devil whispered to him — if it 
were the devil — that he had no right to sacrifice 



136 WOOD AND STONE 

his spiritual influence over this disconcerting pupil, 
out of a mere personal embarrassment. If he gave 
her her lesson along with the rest, all that special 
effort he had bestowed upon her thought, her reading, 
her understanding, might so easily be thrown away! 
She was different, obviously different, from the simple 
village maids, and to put her now, at this late hour, 
with the confirmation only a few weeks off, into the 
common class, would be to undo the work of several 
months. He could not alter his method with the 
others for her sake, and she would be forced to listen 
to teaching which to her would be elementary and 
platitudinous. He would be throwing her back in her 
spiritual development. He would be forcing her to re- 
turn to the mere alphabet of theology at the moment 
when she had just begun to grow interested in its 
subtle and beautiful literature. She would no doubt 
be both bored and teased. Her nerves would be 
ruffled, her interest diminished, her curiosity dulled. 
She would be angry, too, at being treated exactly as 
were these rustic maidens — and anger was not a 
desirable attribute in a gentle catechumen. 

Besides, her case was different from theirs on quite 
technical grounds. She was preparing for baptism as 
well as confirmation, and he, as her priest, was 
bound to make this, the most essential of all Christian 
sacraments, the head and front of his instruction. 
It was hardly to the point to say that the other girls 
knew quite as little of the importance of this sacred 
rite as she did. His explanations of it to them, his 
emphasis upon the blessing it had already been to 
them, would be necessarily too simple and childish 
for her quicker, maturer understanding. 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 137 

As he reached the actual beginning of the woody 
eminence and turned for a moment to inhale the 
magical softness of the invading twilight, it occurred 
to him that from a logically ecclesiastical standpoint 
it was a monstrous thing that he should be serenely 
and coldly debating the cutting off of his spiritual 
assistance from this poor thirsty flower of the heathen 
desert. She was unbaptized — and to be unbaptized, 
according to true doctrine, meant, with all our 
Christian opportunities, a definite peril, a grave and 
assured peril, to her immortal soul. Who was he 
that he should play with such a formidable risk — 
such a risk to such a lamb of the Great Shepherd? 
It was quite probable — he knew it was probable — 
that, angry with him for deserting her so causelessly 
and unreasonably, she would refuse to go further in 
the sacred business. She would say, and say justly, 
that since the affair seemed of so little importance to 
him she would make it of little importance to herself. 
Suppose he were to call in some colleague from 
Yeoborough, and make over this too exciting 
neophyte to some other pastor of souls — would she 
agree to such a casual transference? He knew well 
enough that she would not. 

How unfortunate it was that the peculiar constitu- 
tion of his English Church made these things so 
difficult! The individual personality of the priest 
mattered so much in Anglican circles! The nobler 
self in him envied bitterly at that moment the stricter 
and yet more malleable organization of the Mother 
Church. How easy it would be were he a Roman 
priest. A word to his superior in office, and all 
would arrange itself! It was impossible to imagine 



138 WOOD AND STONE 

himself speaking such a word to the Right Reverend 
the Bishop of Glastonbury. The mere idea of such 
a thing, in our England of discreet propriety, made 
him smile in the midst of his distress. 

The thought of the Roman Church brought into 
his mind the plausible figure of Mr. Taxater. How 
that profound and subtle humanist would chuckle 
over his present dilemma! He would probably 
regard it as a proper and ironical punishment upon 
him for his heretical assumption of this traditional 
office. 

Tradition! That was the thing. Tradition and 
organization. After all, it was only to Hugh Claver- 
ing, as a nameless impersonal priest of God, that 
this lovely outcast lamb came begging to be enfolded. 
He had no right to dally with the question at all. 
There was no question. As the priest of Nevilton it 
was his clear pastoral duty to give every possible 
spiritual assistance to every person in his flock. What 
if the pursuit of this duty did throw temptation — in- 
tolerable temptation — in his way? His business was 
not to try and escape from such a struggle; but to face 
it, to wrestle with it, to overcome it! He was like a 
sentinel at his post in a great war. Was he to leave 
his post and retreat to the rear because the shells 
were bursting so thickly round him? 

He sat down on the grass with his back to an 
ancient thorn-tree and gazed upon the tower of his 
beloved church. Would he not be false to that 
Church — false to his vows of ordination — if he were 
now to draw back from the firing-line of the battle 
and give up the struggle by a cowardly retreat? 
Even supposing the temptation were more than he 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 139 

could endure — even supposing that he fell — would 
not God prefer his suffering such a fall with his face 
to the foe, sword in hand, rather than that he should 
be saved, his consecrated weapon dropped from his 
ringers, in squalid ignoble flight? 

So much for the arguments whispered in his ear 
by the angel of darkness! But he had lately been 
visited by another angel — surely not of darkness — 
and he recalled the plausible reasonings of the great 
champion of the papacy, as he sat in that pleasant 
window sipping his wine. Why should he agitate 
himself so furiously over this little matter? After 
all, why not enjoy the pleasure of this exquisite being's 
society? He was in no danger of doing her any harm 
— he knew Gladys at least well enough by now to 
know that! — and what harm could she do him? 
There was no harm in being attracted irresistibly to 
something so surpassingly attractive! Suppose he 
fell really in love with her? Well! There was no 
religious rule — certainly none in the church he 
belonged to — against falling in love with a lovable 
and desirable girl. But it was not a matter of falling 
in love. He knew that well enough. There was 
very little of the romantic or the sentimental about 
the feelings she aroused in him. It was just a simple, 
sensuous, amorous attraction to a provocative and 
alluring daughter of Eve. Just a simple sensuous 
attraction — so simple, so natural, as to be almost 
"innocent," as Mr. Taxater would put it. 

So he argued with himself; but the Tower of the 
Church opposite seemed to invade the mists of these 
subtle reasonings with a stern emphasis of clear-cut 
protest. He knew well enough that his peculiar 



140 WOOD AND STONE 

nature was not of the kind that might be called 
"sensuous" or "amorous," but of quite a different 
sort. The feelings that had lately been excited in 
him were as concentrated and passionate as his 
feelings for the altar he served. They were indeed 
a sort of temporal inversion of this sacred ardour; 
or, as the cynical Mr. Quincunx in his blunt manner 
would have expressed it, this sacred fire itself was 
only a form taken by the more earthly flame. But 
a "flame" it was, — not any gentle toying with soft 
sensation, — a flame, a madness, a vice, an obsession. 

In no ideal sense could he be said to be "in love" 
with Gladys. He was intoxicated with her. His 
senses craved for her as they might have craved for 
some sort of maddening drug. In his heart of hearts 
he knew well that the emotion he felt was closely 
allied to a curious kind of antagonism. He thought 
of her with little tenderness, with no gentle, responsi- 
ble consideration. Her warm insidious charm mad- 
dened and perturbed him. It did not diffuse itself 
through his senses like a tender fragrance. It pro- 
voked, disturbed, and tantalized. She was no Rose 
of Sharon, to be worshipped forever. She was a Rose 
of Shiraz, to be seized, pressed against his face, and 
flung aside! The appeal she made to him was an 
appeal to what was perverse, vicious, dangerous 
devastating, in his nature. To call his attraction to 
her beauty "innocent" — in Mr. Taxater's phrase — 
was a mere hypercritical white-washing of the brutal 
fact. 

His mind, in its whirling agitation, conjured up the 
image of himself as married to her, as legally and 
absolutely possessed of her. The image was like fuel to 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 141 

his flame, but it brought no solution of the problem. 
Marriage, though permitted by his church, was as 
directly contrary to his own interpretation of his duty 
as a priest, as any mortal sin might be. To him it 
would have been a mortal sin — the betrayal of his 
profoundest ideal. In the perversity — if you will — 
of his ecclesiastical conscience, he felt towards such a 
solution the feeling a man might have if the selling 
of his soul were to be a thing transacted in cold 
blood, rather than in the tempest of the moment. 
To marry Gladys would be to summon the very 
sacraments of his church to bless with a blasphemous 
consecration his treachery to their appeal. 

Rent and torn by all these conflicting thoughts, the 
poor clergyman scrambled once more to his feet, 
pushed his way recklessly through the intervening 
fence, and began ascending the steep side of the 
pyramidal hill. As he struggled upward, through 
burdocks, nettles, tall grasses, red-campion, and 
newly planted firs, his soul felt within him as if it 
were something fleeing from an invincible pursuer. 
The rank aromatic smell of torn elder-boughs and 
the pungent odour of trodden ground-ivy filled his nos- 
trils. His clothes were sprinkled with feathery seed- 
dust. Closely-sticking burs clung to his legs and arms. 
Outstretched branches switched his face with their 
leaves. His feet stumbled over young fern-fronds, 
bent earthwards in their elaborate unsheathing. 

He vaguely associated with his thoughts, as he 
struggled on, certain queer purple markings which 
he noticed on the stalks of the thickly-grown hem- 
locks, and the bind-weed, which entwined itself round 
many of the slenderer tree-stems, became a symbol 



142 WOOD AND STONE 

of the power that assailed him. To escape — to be 
free! This was the burden of his soul's crying as he 
plunged forward through all these dim leafy obstruc- 
tions. 

Gradually, as he drew nearer the hill's summit, 
there formed in his mind the only real sanctuary of 
refuge, the only genuine deliverance. He must obey 
his innate conscience; and let the result be as God 
willed. At all costs he must shake himself clear of 
this hot, sweet, luscious bind-weed, that was choking 
the growth of his soul. His own soul — that, after 
all, was his first care, his predominant concern. To 
keep that, pure and undefiled, and let all else go! 
Confused by the subtle arguments of the serpent, he 
would cling only the more passionately to the actual 
figure of the God-Man, and obey his profound com- 
mand in its literal simplicity. Ecclesiastical casuistry 
might say what it pleased about the danger he 
plunged Gladys into, in thus neglecting her. The 
matter had gone deeper than casuistry, deeper, far 
deeper, than points of doctrine. It had become a 
direct personal struggle between his own soul and 
Satan; a struggle in which, as he well knew, the 
only victory lay in flight. On other fields he might 
be commanded by his celestial Captain to hold his 
post to the last; but in the arena of this temptation, 
to hold the field was to desert the field; to escape 
from it, to win it. 

He paused breathlessly under a clump of larches, 
and stretching out his arms, seized — like Samson 
in the temple of Dagon — two of the slender-growing 
trunks. "Let all this insidious growth of Nature," 
he thought, "all this teeming and prolific exuberance 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 143 

of godless life, be thrust into oblivion, as long as the 
great translunar Secret be kept inviolable!" Ex- 
hausted by the struggle within him he sank down in 
the green twilight of that leafy security, and crossed 
his hands over his knees. Through a gap in the foli- 
age he could perceive the valley below; he could even 
perceive the outline of the roof of Nevilton House. 
But against the magic of those carved pinnacles he 
had found a counter-charm. In the hushed stillness 
about him, he seemed conscious of the power of all 
these entangled growing things as a sinister heathen 
influence pulling him earthward. 

Men differ curiously from one another in this 
respect. To some among them the influences of 
what we call Nature are in harmony with all that 
is good in them, and have a soothing and mystical 
effect. Others seem to disentangle themselves from 
every natural surrounding, and to stand out, against 
the background of their own spiritual horizons, clear- 
edged, opaque, and resistant. 

Clavering was entirely of this latter type. Nature 
to him was always full of hidden dangers and secret 
perils. He found her power a magical, not a mystical, 
one. He resented the spell she cast over him. It 
seemed to lend itself, all too willingly, to the vicious 
demons that delighted to waylay his unguarded hours. 
His instinctive attitude to these enchanting natural 
forces was that of a mediaeval monk. Their bewitch- 
ing shapes, their lovely colours, their penetrating 
odours, were all permeated for him by a subtle diffu- 
sion of something evil there; something capable of 
leading one's spirit desperately, miserably far — if one 
allowed it the smallest welcome. Against all these 



144 WOOD AND STONE 

siren-voices rumouring and whispering so treacher- 
ously around us, against all this shifting and flitting 
wizardry, one defence alone availed ; — the clear-cut, 
absolute authority, of Him who makes the clouds his 
chariot and the earth his footstool. 

As Clavering sat crouching there under his tent of 
larches, the spirit of the Christ he served seemed to 
pass surging through him like a passionate flood. He 
drew deep breaths of exquisite relief and comfort. 
The problem was solved, — was indeed no problem 
at all; for he had nothing to do but to obey the 
absolute authority, the soul-piercing word. Who was 
he to question results? The same God who com- 
manded him to flee from temptation was able — be- 
yond the mystery of his own divine method — to 
save her who tempted him, whether baptized or 
unbaptized ! 

He leapt to his feet, and no more like one pursued, 
but rather like one pursuing, pushed his way to the 
summit of the Mount. The space at the top was 
flat and circular; not unlike, in its smooth level 
surface, the top of the mountain in that very Trans- 
figuration picture which was now overshadowing his 
letter to his enchantress. In the centre of this open 
space rose the thin Thyrsus-shaped tower. He 
advanced to the eastern edge of the hill and looked 
down over the wide-spread landscape. 

The flat elm-fringed meadows of the great mid- 
Somerset plain stretched softly away, till they lost 
themselves in a purple mist. Never had the formi- 
dable outline of the Leonian promontory looked more 
emphatic and sinister than it looked in this deepening 
twilight. The sky above it was of a pale green tint, 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 145 

flecked here and there by feathery streaks of carmine. 
The whole sky-dome was still lit by the pallid reflec- 
tion of the dead sunset; and on the far northern 
horizon, where the Mendip hills rise above the plain, 
a livid whitish glimmer touched the rim of an enor- 
mous range of sombre clouds. 

The priest stood, hushed, and motionless as a statue, 
contemplating this suggestive panorama. But little 
of its transparent beauty passed the surface of his 
consciousness. He was absorbed, rapt, intent. But 
the cause of his abstraction was not the diaphanous 
air-spaces above him or the dark earth beneath him; 
it was the pouring of the waves of divine love through 
his inmost being; it was his fusion with that great 
Spirit of the Beyond which renders its votaries inde- 
pendent of space and time. 

After long exquisite moments of this high exulta- 
tion, his mind gradually resumed its normal function- 
ing. A cynical interpreter of this sublime experience 
would doubtless have attributed the whole phenome- 
non to a natural reaction of the priest, back to his 
habitual moral temper, from the turbulent perturba- 
tions of the recent days. Would such a one have 
found it a mere coincidence that at the moment of 
regaining his natural vision the clergyman's attention 
was arrested by the slow passage of a huge white 
cloud towards the Leonian promontory, a cloud that 
assumed, as it moved, gigantic and almost human 
lineaments? 

Coincidence or not, Clavering's attention was not 
allowed to remain fixed upon this interesting spectacle. 
It seemed as though his return to ordinary human 
consciousness was destined to be attended by the 



146 WOOD AND STONE 

reappearance of ordinary humanity. He perceived in 
the great sloping field on the eastern side of the mount 
the white figure of a woman, walking alone. For the 
moment his heart stood still; but a second glance 
reassured him. He knew that figure, even in the 
dying light. It was little Vennie Seldom. Simul- 
taneously with this discovery he was suddenly aware 
that he was no longer the only frequenter of the 
woody solitudes of Nevilton Hill. On a sort of 
terrace, about a hundred yards below him, there 
suddenly moved into sight a boy and a girl, walking 
closely interlinked and whispering softly. Acting 
mechanically, and as if impelled by an impulse from 
an external power, he sank down upon his knees and 
spied upon them. They too slipped into a semi- 
recumbent posture, apparently upon the branches of 
a fallen tree, and proceeded, in blissful unconscious- 
ness of any spectator, to indulge in a long and pas- 
sionate embrace. From where he crouched Clavering 
could actually discern these innocents' kisses, and 
catch the little pathetic murmurings of their amorous 
happiness. His heart beat wildly and strangely. In 
his fingers he clutched great handfuls of earth. His 
thoughts played him satyrish and fantastic tricks. 
Suddenly he leapt to his feet and stumbled away, like 
an animal that has been wounded. He encountered 
the Thyrsus-shaped tower — that queer fancy of 
eighteenth century leisure — and beat with his hands 
upon its hard smooth surface. After a second or 
two, however, he recovered his self-control; and to 
afford some excuse to his own mind for his mad 
behaviour, he walked deliberately round the edifice, 
looking for its entrance. This he presently found, 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 147 

and stood observing it, with scowling interest, in the 
growing darkness. He had recognized the lovers 
down there. They were both youngsters of his 
parish. He made a detached mental resolve to talk 
tomorrow to the girl's mother. These flirtations 
during the hay-harvest often led to trouble. 

There was just enough light left for him to remark 
some obscure lettering above the little locked door of 
this fanciful erection. It annoyed him that he could 
not read it. With trembling hand he fumbled in his 
pocket — produced a match-box and lit a match. 
There was no difficulty now in reading what it had 
been the humour of some eighteenth century Seldom 
to have carved on this site of the discovery of the 
Holy Rood. "Carpe Diem" he spelt out, before the 
flutterings of an agitated moth extinguished the light 
he held. This then was the oracle he had climbed 
the sacred Mount to hear! 

With quick steps, steps over which his mind seemed 
no longer to have control, he returned to his point of 
observation. The boy and girl had disappeared, but 
Vennie Seldom was still visible in her white dress, 
pacing up and down the meadow. What was she 
doing there? — he wondered. Did she often slip away, 
after the little formal dinner with her mother, and 
wander at large through the evening shadows? An 
unaccountable rage against her beseiged his heart. 
He felt he should soon begin to hate her if he watched 
her much longer; so, with a more collected and calm 
step and a sigh that rose from the depths of his soul 
he moved away to where the path descended. 

As it happened, however, the path he had to follow 
now, for it was too dark to return as he had come, 



148 WOOD AND STONE 

emerged, after many windings round the circle of the 
hill, precisely into the very field, in which Vennie was 
walking. He moved straight towards her. She gave 
a little start when she saw him, but waited passively, 
in that patient drooping pose so natural to her, till 
he was by her side. 

"You too," she said, touching his hand, "feel the 
necessity of being alone a little while before the day 
ends. I always do. Mother sometimes protests. 
But it is no good. There are certain little pleasures 
that we have a right to enjoy — haven't we?" 

They moved together along the base of the hill 
following its circuit in the northerly direction. 
Clavering felt as though, after a backward plunge 
into the Inferno, he had encountered a reproachful 
angel of light. He half expected her to say to him, 
in the crushing austerity of Beatrice, "Lift up your 
chin and answer me face to face." The gentle power 
of her pure spirit over him was so persuasive that in 
the after-ebb of this second turbulent reaction he 
could not refrain from striking the confessional 
note. 

"I wish I were as good as you, Miss Seldom," he 
said. "I fear the power of evil in me goes beyond 
anything you could possibly conceive." 

"There are few things I cannot conceive, Mr. 
Clavering," the girl answered, with that helpless droop 
of her little head that had so winning a pathos. 
"We people who live such secluded lives are not as 
ignorant of the great storms as you may imagine." 

Clavering's voice shook as he responded to this. 

"I wish I could talk quite freely to you. This 
convention that forbids friends such as we are from 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 149 

being frank with one another, seems to me sometimes 
an invention of the devil." 

The girl lifted her head. He could not see in the 
darkness that had now fallen upon them, how her 
mouth quivered and her cheeks grew scarlet. 

"I think I can guess at what is worrying you, my 
friend," she murmured gently. 

He trembled from head to foot with a curious shame. 
"You think it is about Gladys Rorner," he burst 
out. "Well it is! I find her one of the greatest 
difficulties I have ever had in my life." 

"I am afraid," said Vennie timidly, "she intends 
to be a difficulty to you. It is wrong to say so, but 
I have always been suspicious of her motives in this 
desire to enter our church," 

"God knows what her motives are!" sighed the 
priest, "I only know she makes it as hard for me as 
she can." 

As soon as he had uttered these words a queer 
observing sense of having been treacherous to Gladys 
rose in his heart. Once more he had to suppress an 
emotion of hatred for the little saint by his side. 

"I know," murmured Vennie, "I know. She tries 
to play upon your good-nature. She tries to make 
you over-fond of her. I suppose" — she paused for 
a moment — "I suppose she is like that. It is not 
her fault. It is her — her character. She has a mad 
craving for admiration and is ready to play it off on 
anybody." 

"It makes it very difficult to help her," said the 
priest evasively. 

Vennie peered anxiously at his face. "It is not as 
though she really was fond of you" she boldly added. 



150 WOOD AND STONE 

"I doubt whether she is fond of anyone. She loves 
troubling people's minds and making them unhappy." 

"Don't mistake me, Miss Seldom," cried Clavering. 
"I am not in the least sentimental about her — it is 
only — only" — Vennie smoothed his path for him. 

"It is only that she makes it impossible for you to 
teach her," she hazarded, following his lead. "I 
know something of that difficulty myself. These 
wayward pleasure-loving people make it very hard 
for us all sometimes." 

Mr. Clavering shook his stick defiantly into the 
darkness, whether as a movement directed against 
the powers of evil or against the powers of good, he 
would himself have found it hard to say. Queer 
thoughts of a humourous frivolity passed through his 
mind. Something in the girl's grave tone had an 
irritating effect upon him. It is always a little annoy- 
ing, even to the best of men, to feel themselves being 
guided and directed by women, unless they are in 
love with them. Clavering was certainly not in love 
with Vennie; and though in his emotional agitation 
he had gone so far in confiding in her, he was by no 
means unconscious of something incongruous and even 
ridiculous in the situation. This queer new frivolity 
in him, which now peered forth from some twisted 
corner of his nature, like a rat out of a hole, found 
this whole interview intolerably absurd. He suddenly 
experienced the sensation of being led along at 
Vennie's side like a convicted school-boy. He found 
himself rebelling against all women in his heart, 
both good and bad, and recalling, humorously and 
sadly, the old sweet scandalous attitude of contempt 
for the whole sex, of his irresponsible Cambridge days. 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 151 

Perhaps, dimly and unconsciously, he was reacting 
now, after all this interval, to the subtle influence of 
Mr. Taxater. He knew perfectly well that the very 
idea of a man — not to speak of a priest — confid- 
ing his amorous weaknesses to a woman, would have 
excited that epicurean sage to voluble fury. Every- 
thing that was mediaeval and monkish in him rose up 
too, in support of this interior outburst of Rabelaisean 
spleen. 

It would be interesting to know if Vennie had any 
inkling, as she walked in the darkness by his side, 
of this new and unexpected veering of his mood. 
Certainly she refrained from pressing him for any 
further confessions. Perhaps with the genuine clair- 
voyance of a saint she was conscious of her danger. 
At any rate she began speaking to him of herself, 
of her difficulties with her mother and her mother's 
friends, of her desire to be of more use to Lacrima 
Traffic and of the obstacles in the way of that. 

Conversing with friendly familiarity on these less 
poignant topics they arrived at last at the gates of 
the Priory farm and the entrance to the church. 
Mr. Clavering was proceeding to escort her home, 
when she suddenly stopped in the road, and said in a 
quick hurried whisper, "I should dearly love to walk 
once round the churchyard before I go back." 

The cheerful light from the windows of the Goat 
and Boy showed, as it shone upon his face, his 
surprise as well as his disinclination. The truth is, 
that by a subtle reversion of logic he had now reached 
the idea that it was at once absurd and unkind to 
send that letter to Gladys. He was trembling to 
tear it in pieces, and burn the pieces in his kitchen- 



152 WOOD AND STONE 

fire! Vennie however, did not look at his face. She 
looked at the solemn tower of St. Catharine's 
church. 

"Please get the key," she said, "and let us walk 
once round." 

He was compelled to obey her, and knocking at 
the door of the clerk's cottage aroused that aston- 
ished and scandalized official into throwing the object 
required out of his bedroom window. Once inside the 
churchyard however, the strange and mystical power 
of the spot brought his mood into nearer conformity 
with his companion's. 

They stopped, as everyone who visits Nevilton 
churchyard is induced to stop, before the extraordi- 
nary tomb of Gideon and Naomi Andersen. The 
thing had been constructed from the eccentric old 
carver's own design, and had proved one of the 
keenest pleasures of his last hours. 

Like the whimsical poet Donne, he had derived a 
sardonic and not altogether holy delight in contemplat- 
ing before his end the actual slab of earthly consistence 
that was to make his bodily resurrection so emphatically 
miraculous. Clavering and Vennie stood for several 
minutes in mute contemplation before this strange 
monument. It was composed of a huge, solid block of 
Leonian stone, carved at the top into the likeness of an 
enormous human skull, and ornamented, below the 
skull, by a deeply cut cross surrounded by a circle. 
This last addition gave to the sacred symbol within 
it a certain heathen and ungodly look, making it 
seem as though it were no cross at all, but a pagan 
hieroglyph from some remote unconsecrated antiquity. 
The girl laid her fragile hand on the monstrous image 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 153 

of death, which the gloom around them made all the 
more threatening. 

"It is wonderful," she said, "how the power of 
Christ can change even the darkest objects into 
beauty. I like to think of Him striking His hand 
straight through the clumsy half-laws of Man and 
Nature, and holding out to us the promise of things 
far beyond all this morbid dissolution." 

"You are right, my friend," answered the priest. 

"I think the world is really a dark and dreadful 
place," she went on. "I cannot help saying so. I 
know there are people who only see its beauty and 
joy. I cannot feel like that. If it wasn't for Him 
I should be utterly miserable. I think I should go 
mad. There is too much unhappiness — too much to 
be borne! But this strong hand of His, struck clean 
down to us from outside the whole wretched con- 
fusion, — I cling to that; and it saves me. I know 
there are lots of happy people, but I cannot forget 
the others! I think of them in the night. I think 
of them always. They are so many — so many!" 

"Dear child!" murmured the priest, his interlude 
of casual frivolity melting away like mist under the 
flame of her conviction. 

"Do you think," she continued, "that if we were 
able to hear the weeping of all those who suffer and 
have suffered since the beginning of the world, we 
could endure the idea of going on living? It would be 
too much! The burden of those tears would darken 
the sun and hide the moon. It is only His presence 
in the midst of us, — His presence, coming in from 
outside, that makes it possible for us to endure and 
have patience." 



154 WOOD AND STONE 

"Yes, He must come in from outside" murmured 
the priest, "or He cannot help us. He must be able 
to break every law and custom and rule of nature 
and man. He must strike at the whole miserable 
entanglement from outside it — from outside it!" 

Clavering's voice rose almost to a shout as he uttered 
these last words. He felt as though he were refuting 
in one tremendous cry of passionate certainty all those 
"modernistic" theories with which he loved some- 
times to play. He was completely under Vennie's 
influence now. 

"And we must help Him," said the girl, "by 
entering into His Sacrifice. Only by sacrifice — by 
the sacrifice of everything — can we enable Him to 
work the miracle which He would accomplish!" 

Clavering could do nothing but echo her words. 

"The sacrifice of everything," he whispered, and 
abstractedly laid his hand upon the image of death 
carved by the old artist. Moved apparently by an 
unexpected impulse, Vennie seized, with her own, the 
hand thus extended. 

"I have thought," she cried, "of a way out of your 
difficulty. Give her her lessons in the church! That 
will not hurt her feelings, and it will save you. It 
will prevent her from distracting your mind, and 
it will concentrate her attention upon your teaching. 
It will save you both!" 

Clavering held the little hand, thus innocently 
given him, tenderly and solemnly in both of his. 

"You are right, my friend," he said, and then, 
gravely and emphatically as if repeating a vow, — 
"I will take her in the church. That will settle 
everything." 



MYTHOLOGY OF SACRIFICE 155 

Vennie seemed thrilled with spiritual joy at his 
acquiescence in her happy inspiration. She walked 
so rapidly as they recrossed the churchyard that he 
could hardly keep pace with her. She seemed to 
long to escape, to the solitude of her own home, of 
her own room, in order to give full vent to her 
feelings. He locked the gate of the porch behind 
them, and put the key in his pocket. Very quickly 
and in complete silence they made their way up the 
road to the entrance of the vicarage garden. 

Here they separated, with one more significant and 
solemn hand-clasp. It was as if the spirit of St. 
Catharine herself was in the girl, so ethereal did she 
look, so transported by unearthly emotion, as the 
gate swung behind her. 

As for the vicar of Nevilton, he strode back impetu- 
ously to his own house, and there, from its place 
beneath the print of the transfiguration, he took the 
letter, and tore it into many pieces; but he tore it 
with a different intention from that which, an hour 
before, had ruled his brain; and the sleep which 
awaited him, as soon as his head touched his pillow, 
was the soundest and sweetest he had known since 
first he came to the village. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 

IT was late in the afternoon of the day following 
the events just described. Mrs. Fringe was 
passing in and out of Clavering's sitting-room 
making the removal of his tea an opportunity for 
interminable discourse. 

"They say Eliza Wotnot's had a bad week of it 
with one thing and another. They say she be as 
yellow as a lemon-pip in her body, as you might call 
it, and grey as ash-heaps in her old face. I never 
cared for the woman myself, and I don't gather as 
she was desperate liked in the village, but a Chris- 
tian's a Christian when they be laid low in the 
Lord's pleasure, though they be as surly-tongued as 
Satan." 

"I know, I know," said the clergyman impatiently. 

"They say Mr. Taxater sits up with her night after 
night as if he was a trained nurse. Why he don't 
have a nurse I can't think, 'cept it be some papist 
practice. The poor gentleman will be getting woeful 
thin, if this goes on. He's not one for losing his sleep 
and his regular meals." 

"Sally Birch is doing all that for him, Mrs. Fringe," 
said Clavering. "I have seen to it myself." 

"Sally Birch knows as much about cooking a 
gentleman's meals as my Lottie, and that's not saying 
a great deal." 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 157 

"Thank you, Mrs. Fringe, thank you," said Claver- 
ing. "You need not move the table." 

"Oh, of course, 'tis Miss Gladys' lesson-day. They 
say she's given young Mr. Ilminster the go-by, sir. 
'Tis strange and wonderful how some people be made 
by the holy Lord to have their whole blessed pleasure 
in this world. Providence do love the ones as loves 
themselves, and those that seeks what they want shall 
find it! I expect, between ourselves, sir, the young 
lady have got someone else in her eye. They tell me 
some great thundering swell from London is staying 
in the House." 

"That'll do, Mrs. Fringe, that'll do. You can 
leave those flowers a little longer." 

"I ought to let you know, sir, that old Jimmy 
Pringle has gone off wandering again. I saw Witch- 
Bessie at his door when I went to the shop this 
morning and she told me he was talking and talking, 
as badly as ever he did. Far gone, poor old sinner, 
Witch-Bessie said he was." 

"He is a religious minded man, I believe, at bot- 
tom," said the clergyman. 

"He be stark mad, sir, if that's what you mean! As 
to the rest, they say his carryings on with that har- 
lotry down in Yeoborough was a disgrace to a Chris- 
tian country." 

"I know," said Clavering, "I know, but we all 
have our temptations, Mrs. Fringe." 

"Temptations, sir?" and the sandy complexioned 
female snorted with contempt. "And is those as 
takes no drop of liquor, and looks at no man edge- 
ways, though their own lawful partner be a stiff 
corpse of seven years' burying, to be put in the 



158 WOOD AND STONE 

same class with them as goes rampaging with 
harlotries?" 

"He has repented, Mrs. Fringe, he has repented. 
He told me so himself when I met him last week." 

"Repented!" groaned the indignant woman; "he 
repents well who repents when he can't sin no more. 
His talk, if you ask me, sir, is more scandalous than 
religious. Witch-Bessie told me she heard him say 
that he had seen the Lord Himself. I am not a 
learned scholar like you, sir, but I know this, that 
when the Lord does go about the earth he doesn't 
visit hoary old villains like Jimmy Pringle — except 
to tell them they be damned." 

"Did he really say that?" asked the clergyman, 
feeling a growing interest in Mr. Pringle's revelations. 

"Yes, sir, he did, sir! Said he met God, — those 
were his very words, and indecent enough words I 
call them! — out along by Captain Whiffley's drive- 
gate. You should have heard Witch-Bessie tell me. 
He frightened her, he did, the wicked old man! 
God, he said, came to him, as I might come to you, 
sir, quite ordinary and familiar-like. 'Jimmy,' said 
God, all sudden, as if he were a person passing the 
time of day, 'I have come to see you, Jimmy.' 

"'And who may you be, Mister?' said the wicked 
old man, just as though the Lord above were a casual 
decent-dressed gentleman. 

"'I am God, Jimmy,' said the Vision. 'And I be 
come to tell 'ee how dearly I loves 'ee, spite of Satan 
and all his works.' Witch-Bessie told me," Mrs. 
Fringe continued, "how as the old man said things 
to her as she never thought to hear from human lips, 
so dreadful they were." 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 159 

"And what happened then?" asked Clavering 
eagerly. 

"What happened then? Why God went away, he 
said, in a great cloud of roaring fire, and he was 
left alone, all dazed-like. Did you ever hear such a 
scimble-scamble story in your life, sir? And all by 
Captain Whiffley's drive-gate!" 

"Well, Mrs. Fringe," said the clergyman, "I think 
we must postpone the rest of this interesting conver- 
sation till supper-time. I have several things I want 
to do." 

"I know you have, sir, I know you have. It isn't 
easy to find out from all them books ways and means 
of keeping young ladies like Miss Gladys in the path 
of salvation. How does she get on, sir, if I might 
be so bold? I fear she don't learn her catechism as 
quiet and patient as I used to learn mine, under old 
Mr. Ravelin, God forgive him!" 

"Oh, I think Miss Romer is quite as good a 
pupil as you used to be, Mrs. Fringe," said Clave- 
ring, rising and gently ushering her out of the 
door. 

'"She's as good as some of these new-fangled vil- 
lage hussies, anyway," retorted the irrepressible lady, 
turning on the threshold. "They tell me that Lucy 
Vare was off again last night with that rascally Tom 
Mooring. She'll be in trouble, that young girl, before 
she wants to be." 

"I know, I know," sighed the clergyman sadly, 
fumbling with the door handle. 

"You don't know all you ought to know, sir, if 
you'll pardon my boldness," returned the woman, 
making a step backwards. 



160 WOOD AND STONE 

"I know, because I saw them!" shouted Clavering, 
closing the door with irritable violence. 

"Goodness me!" muttered Mrs. Fringe, returning 
to her kitchen, "if the poor young man knew what 
this parish was really like, he wouldn't talk so freely 
about 'seeing' people!" 

Left to himself, Clavering moved uneasily round his 
room, taking down first one book and then another, 
and looking anxiously at his shelves as if seeking 
something from them more efficient than eloquent 
words. 

"As soon as she comes," he said to himself, "I 
shall take her across to the church." 

He had not long to wait. The door at the end of 
the garden-path clicked. Light-tripping steps fol- 
lowed, and Gladys Romer's well-known figure made 
itself visible through the open window. He hastened 
out to meet her, hoping to forestall the hospitable 
Mrs. Fringe. In this, however, he was unsuccessful. 
His house-keeper was already in the porch, taking 
from the girl her parasol and gloves. How these 
little things, these chance-thrown little things, always 
intervene between our good resolutions and their 
accomplishment! He ought to have been ready in his 
garden, on the watch for her. Surely he had not in- 
tentionally remained in his room? No, it was the 
fault of Mrs. Fringe; of Mrs. Fringe and her stories 
about Jimmy Pringle and God. He wished that "a 
roaring cloud of fire" would rise between him and 
this voluptuous temptress. But probably, priest 
though he was, he lacked the faith of that ancient 
reprobate. He stood aside to let her enter. The 
words "I think it would be better if we went over 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 161 

to the church," stuck, unuttered, to the roof of his 
mouth. She held out her white ungloved hand, and 
then, as soon as the door was closed, began very 
deliberately removing her hat. 

He stood before her smiling, that rather inept 
smile, which indicates the complete paralysis of every 
faculty, except the faculty of admiration. He could 
hardly now suggest a move to the church. He 
could not trouble her to re-assume that charming 
hat. Besides, what reason could he give? He did, 
however, give a somewhat ambiguous reason for 
following out Vennie's heroic plan on another — a 
different — occasion. In the tone we use when allay- 
ing the pricks of conscience by tacitly treating that 
sacred monitor as if its intelligence were of an in- 
ferior order: "One of these days," he said, "we must 
have our lesson in the church. It would be so nice 
and cool there, wouldn't it?" 

There was a scent of burning weeds in the front- 
room of the old vicarage, when master and neophyte 
sat down together, at the round oak table, before the 
extended works of Pusey and Newman. Sombre 
were the bindings of these repositories of orthodoxy, 
but the pleasant afternoon sun streamed wantonly 
over them and illumined their gloom. 

Gladys had seated herself so that the light fell 
caressingly upon her yellow hair and deepened into 
exquisite attractiveness the soft shadows of her throat 
and neck. Her arms were sleeveless; and as she leaned 
them against the table, their whiteness and round- 
ness were enhanced by the warm glow. 

The priest spoke in a low monotonous voice, 
explaining doctrines, elucidating mysteries, and em- 



162 WOOD AND STONE 

phasizing moral lessons. He spoke of baptism. He 
described the manner in which the Church had appro- 
priated to her own purpose so many ancient pagan 
customs. He showed how the immemorial heathen 
usages of "immersion" and "ablution" had become, 
in her hands, wonderful and suggestive symbols of 
the purifying power of the nobler elements. He used 
words that he had come, by frequent repetition, to 
know by heart. In order that he might point out 
to her passages in his authors which lent themselves 
to the subject, he brought his chair round to her 
side. 

The sound of her gentle breathing, and the ter- 
rible attraction of her whole figure, as she leant 
forward, in sweet girlish attention to what he was 
saying, maddened the poor priest. 

In her secret heart Gladys hardly understood a 
single word. The phrase "immersion," whenever it 
occurred, gave her an irresistible desire to laugh. She 
could not help thinking of her favourite round pond. 
The pond set her thinking of Lacrima and how 
amusing it was to frighten her. But this lesson with 
the young clergyman was even more amusing. She 
felt instinctively that it was upon herself his atten- 
tion rested, whatever mysterious words might pass 
his lips. 

Once, as they were leaning together over the 
"Development of Christian Doctrine," and he was 
enlarging upon the gradual evolution of one sacred 
implication after another, she let her arm slide lightly 
over the back of his hand; and a savage thrill of 
triumph rose in her heart, as she felt an answering 
magnetic shiver run through his whole frame. 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 163 

"The worship of the Body of our Saviour," he 
said — using his own words as a shield against her — 
"allows no subterfuges, no reserves. It gathers to 
itself, as it sweeps down the ages, every emotion, 
every ardour, every passion of man. It appropriates 
all that is noble in these things to its own high pur- 
pose, and it makes even of the evil in them a means 
to yet more subtle good." 

As he spoke, with an imperceptible gesture of 
liberation he rose from his seat by her side and set 
himself to pace the room. The struggle he was 
making caused his fingers to clench and re-clench 
themselves in the palms of his hands, as though he 
were squeezing the perfume from handfuls of scented 
leaves. 

The high-spirited girl knew by instinct the suffer- 
ing she was causing, but she did not yield to any 
ridiculous pity. She only felt the necessity of holding 
him yet more firmly. So she too rose from her chair, 
and, slipping softly to the window, seated herself 
sideways upon its ledge. Balanced charmingly here 
— like some wood-nymph stolen from the forest to 
tease the solitude of some luckless hermit — she 
stretched one arm out of the window, and pulling 
towards her a delicate branch of yellow roses, pressed 
it against her breast. 

The pose of her figure, as she balanced herself 
thus, was one of provoking attractiveness, and with 
a furtive look of feline patience in her half-shut eyes 
she waited while it threw its spell over him. 

The scent of burning weeds floated into the room. 
Clavering's thoughts whirled to and fro in his head 
like whipped chaff. "I must go on speaking," he 



164 WOOD AND STONE 

thought; "and I must not look at her. If I look at 
her I am lost." He paced the room like a caged 
animal. His soul cried out within him to be liber- 
ated from the body of this death. He thought of 
the strange tombstone of Gideon Andersen, and 
wished he too were buried under it, and free forever! 

"Yet is it not my duty to look at her?" the devil 
in his heart whispered. "How can I teach her, how 
can I influence her for good, if I do not see the effect 
of my words? Is it not an insult to the Master 
Himself, and His Divine power, to be thus cowardly 
and afraid?" 

His steps faltered and he leant against the table. 

"Christ," he found his lips repeating, "is the ex- 
planation of all mysteries. He is the secret root 
of all natural impulses in us. All emerge from Him 
and all return to Him. He is to us what their ancient 
god Pan was to the Greeks. He is in a true sense 
our All — for in him is all we are, all we have, and 
all we hope. All our passions are His. Touched by 
Him, their true originator, they lose their dross, are 
purged of their evil, and give forth sweet-smelling, 
sweet-breathing — yellow roses!" 

He had not intended to say "yellow roses." The 
sentence had rounded itself off so, apart from his 
conscious will. 

The girl gravely indicated that she heard him; and 
then smiled dreamily, acquiescingly — the sort of 
smile that yields to a spiritual idea, as if it were a 
physical caress. 

The scent of burning weeds continued to float in 
through the window. "Oh, it has gone!" she cried 
suddenly, as, released from her fingers, the branch 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 165 

swung back to its place against the sand-stone 
wall. 

"I must have it again," she added, bending her 
supple body backwards. She made one or two inef- 
fectual efforts and then gave up, panting. "I can't 
reach it," she said. "But go on, Mr. Clavering. I 
can listen to you like this. It is so nice out here." 

Strange unfathomable thoughts surged up in the 
depths of Clavering's soul. He found himself wishing 
that he had authority over her, that he might tame 
her wilful spirit, and lay her under the yoke of some 
austere penance. Why was she free to provoke him 
thus, with her merciless fragility? The madness she 
was arousing grew steadily upon him. He stumbled 
awkwardly round the edge of the table and ap- 
proached her. The scent of burning weeds became 
yet more emphatic. To make his nearness to her 
less obvious, and out of a queer mechanical instinct 
to allay his own conscience, he continued his spiritual 
admonitions, even when he was quite close — even 
when he could have touched her with his hand. And 
it would be so easy to touch her! The playful 
perilousness of her position in the window made such 
a movement natural, justifiable, almost conventional. 

"The true doctrine of the Incarnation," his lips re- 
peated, "is not that something contrary to nature 
has happened; it is that the innermost secret of 
Nature has been revealed. And this secret," — here 
his fingers closed feverishly on the casement-latch — 
is identical with the force that swings the furthest 
star, and drives the sap through the veins of all living 
things." 

It would have been of considerable interest to 



166 WOOD AND STONE 

a student of religious psychology — like Mr. Taxater 
for example — to observe how the phrases that 
mechanically passed Clavering's lips at this juncture 
were all phrases drawn from the works of rational- 
istic modernists. He had recently been reading the 
charming and subtle essays of Father Mervyn; and 
the soft and melodious harmonies of that clever 
theologian's thought had accumulated in some hidden 
corner of his brain. The authentic religious emotion 
in him being superseded by a more powerful impulse, 
his mind mechanically reverted to the large, dim 
regions of mystical speculation. A certain instinct 
in him — the instinct of his clamorous senses — made 
him careful to blur, confuse, and keep far back, that 
lovely and terrible "Power from Outside," the hem 
of Whose garments he had clung to, the night 
before. "Christ," he went on, "is, as it were, the 
centre and pivot of the whole universe, and every 
revelation granted to us of His nature is a revelation 
from the system of things itself. I want you to 
understand that our true attitude towards this great 
mystery, ought to be the attitude of scientific ex- 
plorers, who in searching for hidden causes have 
come upon the one, the unique Cause." 

The girl's only indication that she embraced the 
significance of these solemn words was to make a 
sudden gliding serpentine movement which brought 
her into a position more easy to be retained, and 
yet one that made it still more unnatural that he 
should refuse her some kind of playful and affectionate 
support. 

The poor priest's heart beat tumultuously. He 
began to lose all consciousness of everything except 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 167 

his propinquity to his provoker. He was aware 
with appalling distinctness of the precise texture 
of the light frock that she wore. It was of a 
soft fawn colour, crossed by wavy lines of a darker 
tint. He watched the way these wavy lines fol- 
lowed the curves of her figure. They began at 
her side, and ended where her skirt hung loose 
over her little swinging ankles. He wished these 
lines had sloped upwards, instead of downwards; then 
it would have been so much easier for him to fol- 
low the argument of the "Development of Christian 
Doctrine." 

Still that scent of burning weeds! Why must his 
neighbours set fire to their rubbish, on this particular 
afternoon? 

With a fierce mental effort he tried to suppress 
the thought that those voluptuous lips only waited 
for him to overcome his ridiculous scruples. Why 
must she wait like this so pitilessly passive, laying 
all the burden of the struggle upon him? If she 
would only make a little — a very little — move- 
ment, his conscience would be able to recover its 
equilibrium, whatever happened. He tried to un- 
magnetize her attraction, by visualizing the fact that 
under this desirable form — so near his touch — 
lurked nothing but that bleak, bare, last outline of 
mortality, to which all flesh must come. He tried 
to see her forehead, her closed eyes, her parted 
lips, as they would look if resting in a coffin. Like 
his monkish predecessors in the world-old struggle 
against Satan, he sought to save himself by clutching 
fast to the grinning skull. 

All this while his lips went on repeating their 



168 WOOD AND STONE 

liturgical formula. "We must learn to look upon the 
Redemption, as a natural, not a supernatural fact. 
We must learn to see in it the motive-force of the 
whole stream of evolution. We must remember that 
things are what they have it in them to become. 
It is the purpose, the end, which is the true truth 
— not the process or the method. Christ is the end 
of all things. He is therefore the beginning of all 
things. All things find their meaning, their place, 
their explanation, only in relation to Him. He is 
the reality of the illusion which we call Nature, 
and of the illusion which we call Life. In Him the 
universe becomes real and living — which else were 
a mere engine of destruction." How much longer 
he would have continued in this strain — conquered 
yet still resisting — it were impossible to say. All 
these noble words, into the rhythm of which so 
much passionate modern thought had been poured, 
fell from his lips like sand out of a sieve. 

The girl herself interrupted him. With a quick 
movement she suddenly jerked herself from her re- 
cumbent position; jumped, without his help, lightly 
down upon the floor, and resumed her former place 
at the table. The explanation of this virtuous re- 
treat soon made itself known in the person of a 
visitor advancing up the garden. Clavering, who 
had stumbled foolishly aside as she changed her 
place, now opened the door and went to meet the 
new-comer. 

It was Romer's manager, Mr. Thomas Lickwit, 
discreet, obsequious, fawning, as ever, — but with 
a covert malignity in his hurried words. "Sorry to 
disturb you, sir. I see it is Miss Gladys' lesson. I 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 169 

hope the young lady is getting on nicely, sir. I 
won't detain you for more than a moment. I have 
just a little matter that couldn't wait. Business is 
business, you know." 

Clavering felt as though he had heard this last 
observation repeated "ad nauseam" by all the dis- 
gusting sycophants in all the sensational novels he 
had ever read. It occurred to him how closely Mr. 
Lickwit really did resemble all these monotonously 
unpleasant people. 

"Yes," went on the amiable man, "business is 
business — even with reverend gentlemen like your- 
self who have better things to attend to." Clavering 
forced himself to smile in genial appreciation of this 
airy wit, and beckoned the manager into his study. 
He then returned to the front room. "I am afraid 
our lesson must end for to-night, Miss Romer," 
he said. "You know enough of this lieutenant 
of your father's to guess that he will not be easy 
to get rid of. The worst of a parson's life are these 
interruptions." 

There was no smile upon his face as he said this, 
but the girl laughed merrily. She adjusted her hat 
with a deliciously coquettish glance at him through 
the permissible medium of the gilt-framed mirror. 
Then she turned and held out her hand. "Till next 
week, then, Mr. Clavering. And I will read all those 
books you sent up for me — even the great big black 
one!" 

He gravely opened the door for her, and with a 
sigh from a heart "sorely charged," returned to face 
Mr. Lickwit. 

He found that gentleman comfortably ensconced 



170 WOOD AND STONE 

in the only arm-chair. "It is like this, sir," said 
the man, when Clavering had taken a seat opposite 
him. "Mr. Romer thinks it would be a good thing 
if this Social Meeting were put a stop to. There 
has been talk, sir. I will not conceal it from you. 
There has been talk. The people say that you 
have allied yourself with that troublesome agitator. 
You know the man I refer to, sir, that wretched 
Wone. 

" Mr. Romer doesn't approve of what he hears of 
these meetings. He doesn't see as how they serve any 
good purpose. He thinks they promote discord in 
the place, and set one class against another. He does 
not like the way, neither, that Mr. Quincunx has 
been going on down there; nor to say the truth, sir, 
do I like that gentleman's doings very well. He 
speaks too free, does Mr. Quincunx, much too free, 
considering how he is situated as you might say." 

Clavering leapt to his feet, trembling with anger. 
"I cannot understand this," he said, "Someone has 
been misleading Mr. Romer. The Social Meeting 
is an old institution of this village; and though it is 
not exactly a church affair, I believe it is almost 
entirely frequented by church-goers. I have always 
felt that it served an invaluable purpose in this place. 
It is indeed the only occasion when priest and people 
can meet on equal terms and discuss these great 
questions man to man. No — no, Lickwit, I cannot 
for a moment consent to the closing of the Social 
Meeting. It would undo the work of years. It 
would be utterly unwise. In fact it would be wrong. 
I cannot think how you can come to me with such a 
proposal." 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 171 

Mr. Lickwit made no movement beyond causing 
his hat to twirl round on the top of the stick he held 
between his knees. 

"You will think better of it, sir. You will think 
better of it," he said. "The election is coming on, 
and Mr. Romer expects all supporters of Church and 
State to help him in his campaign. You have heard 
he is standing, sir, I suppose?" 

Mr. Lickwit uttered the word "standing" in a 
tone which suggested to Clavering's mind a grotesque 
image of the British Constitution resting like an enor- 
mous cornucopia on the head of the owner of Leo's 
Hill. He nodded and resumed his seat. The manager 
continued. "That old Methodist chapel where those 
meetings are held, belongs, as you know, to Mr. 
Romer. He is thinking of having it pulled down — 
not only because of Wone's and Quincunx's goings on 
there, but because he wants the ground. He's think- 
ing of building an estate-office on that corner. We 
are pressed for room, up at the Hill, sir." 

Once more Clavering rose to his feet. "This is too 
much!" he cried. "I wonder you have the im- 
pertinence to come here and tell me such things. I 
am not to be bullied, Lickwit. Understand that! 
I am not to be bullied." 

"Then I may tell the master," said the man sneer- 
ingly, rising in his turn and making for the door, 
"that Mr. Parson won't have nothing to do with 
our little plan?" 

"You may tell him what you please, Lickwit. I 
shall go over myself at once to the House and see 
Mr. Romer." He glanced at his watch. "It is not 
seven yet, and I know he does not dine till eight." 



172 WOOD AND STONE 

"By all means, sir, by all means! He'll be ex- 
tremely glad to see you. You couldn't do better, sir. 
You'll excuse me if I don't walk up with you. I have 
to run across and speak to Mr. Goring." 

He bowed himself out and hurried off. Clavering 
seized his hat and followed him, turning, however, 
when once in the street, in the direction of the south 
drive. It took him scarcely a couple of minutes to 
reach the village square where the drive emerged. 
In the centre of the square stood a solid erection of 
Leonian stone adapted to the double purpose of a 
horse-trough and a drinking fountain. Here the 
girls came to draw water, and here the lads came to 
chat and flirt with the girls. Mr. Clavering could 
not help pausing in his determined march to watch 
a group of young people engaged in animated and 
laughing frivolity at this spot. It was a man and 
two girls. He recognized the man at once by his 
slight figure and lively gestures. It was Luke Ander- 
sen. "That fellow has a bad influence in this place," 
he said to himself. "He takes advantage of his 
superior education to unsettle these children's minds. 
I must stop this." He moved slowly towards the 
fountain. Luke Andersen looked indeed as reckless 
and engaging as a young faun out of a heathen 
story. He was making a cup of his two hands and 
whimsically holding up the water to the lips of the 
younger of his companions, while the other one giggled 
and fluttered round them. Had the priest been in 
a poetic humour at that moment, he might have 
been reminded of those queer mediaeval legends of 
the wanderings of the old dispossessed divinities. 
The young stone-carver, with his classic profile and 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 173 

fair curly hair, might have passed for a disguised 
Dionysus seducing to his perilous service the women 
of some rustic Thessalian hamlet. No pleasing image 
of this kind crossed Hugh Clavering's vision. All he 
saw, as he approached the fountain, was another 
youthful incarnation of the dangerous Power he had 
been wrestling with all the afternoon. He advanced 
towards the engaging Luke, much as Christian might 
have advanced towards Apollyon. "Good evening, 
Andersen," he said, with a certain professional sever- 
ity. "Using the fountain, I see? We must be careful, 
though, not to waste the water this hot summer." 

The girl who was drinking rose up with a little 
start, and stood blushing and embarrassed. Luke 
appeared entirely at his ease. He leant negligently 
against the edge of the stone trough, and pushed his 
hat to the back of his head. In this particular pose 
he resembled to an extraordinary degree the famous 
Capitolian statue. 

"It is hardly wasting the water, Mr. Clavering," 
he said with a smile, "offering it to a beautiful 
mouth. Why don't you curtsey to Mr. Clavering, 
Annie? I thought all you girls curtsied when clergy- 
men spoke to you." 

The priest frowned. The audacious aplomb of the 
young man unnerved and disconcerted him. 

"Water in a stone fountain like this," went on 
the shameless youth, "has a peculiar charm these 
hot evenings. It makes you almost fancy you are 
in Seville. Seville is a place in Spain, Annie. Mr. 
Clavering will tell you all about it." 

"I think Annie had better run in to her mother 
now," said the priest severely. 



174 WOOD AND STONE 

"Oh, that's all right," replied the youth with un- 
ruffled urbanity. "Her mother has gone shopping in 
Yeoborough and I have to see that Annie behaves 
properly till she comes back." 

Clavering looked reproachfully at the girl. Some- 
thing about him — his very inability perhaps to cope 
with this seductive Dionysus — struck her simple 
intelligence as pathetic. She made a movement as 
if to join her companion, who remained roguishly 
giggling a few paces off. But Luke boldly restrained 
her. Putting his hand on her shoulder he said 
laughingly to the priest, "She will be a heart-breaker 
one of these days, Mr. Clavering, will our Annie 
here! You wouldn't think she was eighteen, would 
you, sir?' 

Under other circumstances the young clergyman 
would have unhesitatingly commanded the girl to go 
home. But his recent experiences had loosened the 
fibre of his moral courage. Besides, what was there 
to prevent this incorrigible young man from walking 
off after her? One could hardly — at least in Protes- 
tant England — make one's flock moral by sheer 
force. 

"Well — good-night to you all," he said, and 
moved away, thinking to himself that at any rate 
there was safety in publicity. "But what a danger- 
ous person that Andersen is! One never knows how 
to deal with these half-and-half people. If he were 
a village-boy it would be different. And it would be 
different if he were a gentleman. But he is neither 
one thing or the other. Seville! Who would have 
thought to have heard Seville referred to, in the 
middle of Nevilton Square?" 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 175 

He reached the carved entrance of the House with 
its deeply-cut armorial bearings — the Seldom falcon 
with the arrow in its beak. "No more will that bird 
fly," he thought, as he waited for the door to open. 

He was ushered into the spacious entrance hall, 
the usual place of reception for Mr. Romer's less 
favoured guests. The quarry-owner was alone. He 
shook hands affably with his visitor and motioned 
him to a seat. 

"I have come about that question of the Social 
Meeting — " he began. 

Mr. Romer cut him short. "It is no longer a 
question," he said. "It is a 'fait accompli.' I have 
given orders to have the place pulled down next 
week. I want the space for building purposes." 

Clavering turned white with anger. "We shall have 
to find another room then," he said. "I cannot 
have those meetings dropping out from our village 
life. They keep the thoughtful people together as 
nothing else can." 

Mr. Romer smiled grimly. "You will find it diffi- 
cult to discover another place," he remarked. 

"Then I shall have them in my own house," said 
the vicar of Nevilton. 

Mr. Romer crossed his hands and threw back his 
head; looking, with the air of one who watches the 
development of precisely foreseen events, straight 
into the sad eyes of the little Royal Servant on the 
wall. 

"Pardon such a question, my friend," said he, "but 
may I ask you what your personal income is, at this 
moment?" 

"You know that well enough," returned the other. 



176 WOOD AND STONE 

"I have nothing beyond the hundred and fifty 
pounds I receive as vicar of this place." 

"And what," pursued the Quarry-owner, "may 
your expenditure amount to?" 

"That, also, you know well," replied Clavering. 
"I give away about eighty pounds, every year, to 
the poor of this village." 

"And where does this eighty pounds come from?" 
went on the Squire. The priest was silent. 

"I will tell you where it comes from," pronounced 
the other. "It comes from me. It is my contribu- 
tion, out of the tithes which I receive as lay-rector. 
And it is the larger part of them." 

The priest was still silent. 

"When I first came here," his interlocutor con- 
tinued, "I gave up these tithes as an offering to our 
village necessities; and I have not yet withdrawn 
them. If this Social Meeting, Mr. Clavering, is not 
brought to an end, I shall withdraw them. And no 
one will be able to blame me." 

Hugh jumped up on his feet with a gesture of 
fury. "I call this," he shouted, "nothing short of 
sacrilege! Yes, sacrilege and tyranny! I shall pro- 
claim it abroad. I shall write to the papers. I shall 
appeal to the bishop — to the country!" 

"As you please," said Mr. Romer quietly, "as you 
please. I should only like to point out that any 
action of this kind will tie up my purse-strings for- 
ever. You will not be popular with your flock, my 
friend. I know something of our dear Nevilton 
people; and I shall have only to make it plain to 
them that it is their vicar who has reduced this 
charity; and you will not find yourself greatly loved!" 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 177 

Clavering fell back into his chair with a groan. 
He knew too well the truth of the man's words. He 
knew also the straits into which this lack of money- 
would plunge half his benevolent activities in the 
parish. He hung his head gloomily and stared at the 
floor. What would he not have given, at that mo- 
ment, to have been able to meet this despot, man to 
man, unencumbered by his duty to his people! 

"Let me assure you, my dear sir," said Mr. Romer 
quietly, "that you are not by any means fighting 
the cause of your church, in supporting this wretched 
Meeting. If I were bidding you interrupt your 
services or your sacraments, it would be another 
matter. This Social Meeting has strong anti-clerical 
prejudices. You know that, as well as I. It is 
conducted entirely on noncomformist lines. I hap- 
pen to be aware," he added, "since you talk of 
appealing to the bishop, that the good man has al- 
ready, on more than one occasion, protested vigor- 
ously against the association of his clergy with this 
kind of organization. I do not know whether you 
ever glance at that excellent paper the Guardian; 
but if so you will find, in this last week's issue, a 
very interesting case, quite parallel to ours, in which 
the bishop's sympathies were by no means on the 
side you are advocating." 

The young priest rose and bowed. "There is, at 
any rate, no necessity for me to trouble you any 
further/' he said. "So I will bid you good- 
night." 

He left the hall hastily, picked up his hat, and let 
himself out, before his host had time to reply. All 
the way down the drive his thoughts reverted to the 



178 WOOD AND STONE 

seductive wiles of this despot's daughter. "The 
saints are deserting me," he thought, "by reason of 
my sin." 

He was not, even then, destined to escape his 
temptress. Gladys, who doubtless had been expect- 
ing this sudden retreat, emerged from the shadow of 
the trees and intercepted him. "I will walk to the 
gate with you," she said. The power of feminine 
attraction is never more insidious than at the mo- 
ment of bitter remorse. The mind reverts so easily, 
so willingly, then, back to the dangerous way. The 
mere fact of its having lost its pride of resistance, its 
vanity of virtue, makes it yield to a new assault with 
terrible facility. She drew him into the dusky twi- 
light of the scented exotic cedars which bordered the 
way, on the excuse of inhaling their fragrance more 
closely. 

She made him pull down a great perfumed cypress- 
bough, of some unusual species, so that they might 
press their faces against it. They stood so closely 
together that she could feel through her thin evening- 
gown the furious trembling that seized him. She knew 
that he had completely lost his self-control, and was 
quite at her mercy. But Gladys had not the least 
intention of yielding herself to the emotion she had 
excited. What she intended was that he should 
desire her to desperation, not that, by the least 
touch, his desire should be gratified. In another 
half-second, as she well knew, the poor priest would 
have seized her in his arms. In place of permitting 
this, what she did was to imprint a fleeting kiss with 
her warm lips upon the back of his hand, and then 
to leap out of danger with a ringing laugh. "Good- 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 179 

bye!" she called back at him, as she ran off. "I'll 
come in good time next week." 

It may be imagined in what a turbulence of miser- 
able feelings Hugh Clavering repassed the village 
square. He glanced quickly at the fountain. Yes! 
Luke Andersen was still loitering in the same place, 
and the little bursts of suppressed screams and 
laughter, and the little fluttering struggles, of the 
group around him, indicated that he was still, in his 
manner, corrupting the maidens of Nevilton. The 
priest longed to put his hands to his ears and run 
down the street, even as Christian ran from the 
city of Destruction. What was this power — this in- 
vincible, all-pervasive power — against which he had 
committed himself to contend? He felt as though 
he were trying, with his poor human strength, to 
hold back the sea-tide, so that it should not cover 
the sands. 

Could it be that, after all, the whole theory of the 
church was wrong, and that the great Life-Force was 
against her, and punishing her, for seeking, with 
her vain superstitions, to alter the stars in their 
courses? 

Could it be that this fierce pleasure-lust, which he 
felt so fatally in Gladys, and saw in Luke, and was 
seduced by in his own veins, was after all the true 
secret of Nature, and, to contend against it, madness 
and impossible folly? Was he, and not they, the 
really morbid and infatuated one — morbid with the 
arbitrary pride of a desperate tradition of perverted 
heroic souls? He moved along the pavement under 
the church wall and looked up at its grand im- 
movable tower. "Are you, too," he thought, "but 



180 WOOD AND STONE 

the symbol of an insane caprice in the mad human 
race, seeking, in fond recklessness, to alter the basic 
laws of the great World?" 

The casuistical philosophy of Mr. Taxater returned 
to his mind. What would the papal apologist say 
to him now, thus torn and tugged at by all the 
forces of hell? He felt a curious doubt in his heart 
as to the side on which, in this mad struggle, the 
astute theologian really stood. Perhaps, for all his 
learning, the man was no more Christian in his true 
soul, than had been many of those historic popes 
whose office he defended. In his desperate mood 
Clavering longed to get as near as possible to the 
altar of this God of his, who thus bade him confront 
the whole power of nature and all the wisdom of the 
world. He looked up and down the street. Two men 
were talking outside The Goat and Boy, but their 
backs were turned. With a quick sudden movement 
he put his hands on the top of the wall and scrambled 
hastily over, scraping his shins as he did so on a 
sharp stone at the top. He moved rapidly to the 
place where rose the strange tombstone designed by 
the atheist carver. It was here that Vennie and he 
had entered into their heroic covenant only twenty- 
four hours before. He looked at the enormous skull 
so powerfully carved and at the encircled cross be- 
neath it. He laid his hand upon the skull, precisely 
as he had done the night before; only this time there 
were no little cold fingers to instil pure devotion into 
him. Instead of the touch of such fingers he felt the 
burning contact of Gladys' soft lips. 

No ! it was an impossible task that his God had laid 
upon him. Why not give up the struggle? Why not 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 181 

throw over this rnad idol of purity he had raised for his 
worship, and yield himself to the great stream? The 
blood rushed to his head with the alluring images that 
this thought evoked. Perhaps, after all, Gladys would 
marry him, and then — why, then, he could revert 
to the humourous wisdom of Mr. Taxater, and culti- 
vate the sweet mystical speculations of modernism; 
reconciling, pleasantly and easily, the natural pleasures 
of the senses, with the natural exigencies of the soul! 

He left Gideon's grave and walked back to the 
church-porch. It was now nearly dark and without 
fear of being observed by any one through the iron 
bars of the outer gate, he entered the porch and stood 
before the closed door. He wished he had brought 
the key with him. How he longed, at that moment, 
to fling himself down before the altar and cry aloud 
to his God! 

By his side stood the wheeled parish bier, orna- 
mented by a gilt inscription, informing the casual 
intruder that it had been presented to the place in 
honour of the accession of King George the Fifth. 
There was not light enough to read these touching 
words, but the gilt plate containing them gave forth 
a faint scintillating glimmer. 

Worn out by the day-long struggle in his heart, 
Clavering sat down upon this grim "memento mori"; 
and then, after a minute or two, finding that position 
uncomfortable, deliberately stretched himself out at 
full length upon the thing's bare surface. Lying here, 
with the bats flitting in and out above his head, the 
struggle in his mind continued. Supposing he did 
yield, — not altogether, of course; his whole nature 
was against that, and his public position stood in the 



182 WOOD AND STONE 

way, — but just a little, just a hair's breadth, could 
he not enjoy a light playful flirtation with Gladys, 
such as she was so obviously prepared for, even if it 
were impossible to marry her? The worst of it was 
that his imagination so enlarged upon the pleasures 
of this "playful flirtation," that it very quickly be- 
came an obsessing desire. He propped himself up 
upon his strange couch and looked forth into the 
night. The stars were just beginning to appear, and 
he could see one or two constellations whose names 
he knew. How indifferent they were, those far-off 
lights ! What did it matter to them whether he yielded 
or did not yield? He had the curious sensation that 
the whole conflict in which he was entangled belonged 
to a terrestial sphere infinitely below those heavenly 
luminaries. Not only the Power against which he 
contended, but the Power on whose side he fought, 
seemed out-distanced and derided by those calm 
watchers. 

He sank back again and gazed up at the carved 
stone roof above him. A dull inert weariness stole 
over his brain; a sick disgust of the whole mad 
business of a man's life upon earth. Why was he born 
into the world with passions that he must not satisfy 
and ideals that he could not hold? Better not to have 
been born at all; or, being born, better to lie quiet 
and untroubled, with all these placid church-yard 
people, under the heavy clay! The mental weariness 
that assailed him gradually changed into sheer physi- 
cal drowsiness. His head sought instinctively a more 
easy position and soon found what it sought. His 
eyes closed; and there, upon the parish bier, worn 
out with his struggle against Apollyon, the vicar of 



THE MYTHOLOGY OF POWER 183 

Nevilton slept. When he returned to consciousness 
he found himself cramped, cold and miserable. Hur- 
riedly he scrambled to his feet, stretched his stiff 
limbs and listened. The clock in the Tower above him 
began to strike. It struck one — two — and then 
stopped. He had slept for nearly five hours. 



CHAPTER X 

THE ORCHARD 

EVERY natural locality has its hour of special 
self-assertion; its hour, when the peculiar quali- 
ties and characteristics which belong to it 
emphasize themselves, and attain a sort of temporary 
apogee or culmination. It is then that such localities — 
be they forests or moors, hill-sides or valleys — seem 
to gather themselves together and bring themselves 
into focus, waiting expectantly, it might almost seem, 
for some answering dramatic crisis in human affairs 
which should find in them an inevitable background. 

One of the chief features of our English climate is 
that no two successive days, even in a spell of the 
warmest weather, are exactly alike. What one might 
call the culminant day of that summer, for the or- 
chards of Nevilton, arrived shortly after Mr. Cover- 
ing's unfortunate defeat. Every hour of this day 
seemed to add something more and more expressive to 
their hushed and expectant solitudes. 

Though the hay had been cut, or was being cut, in 
the open fields, in these shadowy recesses the grass 
was permitted to grow lush and long, at its own 
unimpeded will. 

Between the ancient trunks of the moss-grown 
apple-trees hung a soft blue vapour; and the flicker- 
ing sunlight that pierced the denser foliage, threw 
shadows upon the heavy grass that were as deeply 



' 



THE ORCHARD 185 

purple as the waves of the mid-atlantic. There 
was indeed something so remote from the ordinary 
movements of the day about this underworld of 
dim, rich seclusion, that the image of a sleepy wave- 
lulled land, long sunken out of reach of human in- 
vasion, under the ebbing and flowing tide, seemed 
borne in naturally upon the imagination. 

It was towards the close of the afternoon of this 
particular segment of time that the drowsy languor of 
these orchards reached its richest and most luxurious 
moment. Grass, moss, lichen, mistletoe, gnarled 
trunks, and knotted roots, all seemed to cry aloud, 
at this privileged hour, for some human recognition of 
their unique quality; some human event which should 
give that quality its dramatic value, its planetary 
proportion. Not since the Hesperidean Dragon 
guarded its sacred charge, in the classic story, has 
a more responsive background offered itself to what 
Catullus calls the "furtive loves" of mortal men. 

About six o'clock, on this day of the apogee of the 
orchards, Mr. Romer, seated on the north terrace 
of his house, caught sight of his daughter and her 
companion crossing the near corner of the park. He 
got up at once, and walked across the garden to inter- 
cept them. The sight of the Italian's slender droop- 
ing figure, as she lingered a little behind her cousin, 
roused into vivid consciousness all manner of subter- 
ranean emotions in the quarry-owner's mind. He 
felt as an oriental pasha might feel, when under the 
stress of some political or monetary transaction, he 
is compelled to hand over his favorite girl-slave to 
an obsequious dependent. The worst of it was that 
he could not be absolutely sure of Mr. Goring's 



186 WOOD AND STONE 

continued adherence. It was within the bounds of 
possibility that once in possession of Lacrima, the 
farmer might breathe against him gross Thersites- 
like defiance, and carry off his captive to another 
county. He experienced, at that moment, a sharp 
pang of inverted remorse at the thought of having 
to relinquish his prey. 

As he strode along by the edge of the herbaceous 
borders, where the blue spikes of the delphiniums were 
already in bud, his mind swung rapidly from point 
to point in the confused arena of his various contests 
and struggles. 

Mixed strangely enough with his direct Napoleonic 
pursuit of wealth and power, there was latent in 
Mr. Romer, as we have already hinted, a certain 
dark and perverse sensuality, which was capable of 
betraying and distorting, in very curious ways, the 
massive force of his intelligence. 

At this particular moment, as he emerged into the 
park, he found himself beginning to regret his conver- 
sation with his brother-in-law. But, after all, he 
thought, when Gladys married, it would be difficult 
to find any reason for keeping Lacrima at his side. 
His feelings towards the girl were a curious mixture 
of attraction and hatred. And what could better 
gratify this mixed emotion than a plan which would 
keep her within his reach and at the same time 
humiliate and degrade her? To do the master of 
Nevilton justice, he was not, at that moment, as he 
passed under a group of Spanish chestnuts and ob- 
served the object of his conspiracy rendered gentler 
and more fragile than ever by the loveliness of her 
surroundings, altogether devoid of a certain remote 



THE ORCHARD 187 

feeling of compunction. He crushed it down, however, 
by his usual thought of the brevity and futility of 
all these things, and the folly of yielding to weak 
commiseration, when, in so short a time, nothing, 
one way or the other, would matter in the least! 
He had long ago trained himself to make use of these 
materialistic reasonings to suppress any irrelevant 
prickings of conscience which might interfere with 
the bias of his will. The whole world, looked at with 
the bold cynical eye of one who was not afraid to 
face the truth, was, after all, a mad, wild, unmeaning 
struggle; and, in the confused arena of this struggle, 
one could be sure of nothing but the pleasure one 
derived from the sensation of one's own power. He 
tried, as he walked towards the girls, to imagine to 
himself what his feelings would be, supposing he yielded 
to these remote scruples, and let Lacrima go, giving 
her money, for instance, to enable her to live inde- 
pendently in her own country, or to marry whom she 
pleased. She would no doubt marry that damned 
fool Quincunx! Lack of money was, assuredly, all 
that stood in the way. And how could he contem- 
plate an idea of that kind with any pleasure? He 
wondered, in a grim humourous manner, what sort of 
compensation these self-sacrificing ones really got? 
What satisfaction would he get, for instance, in the 
consciousness that he had thrown a girl who attracted 
him, into the arms of an idiot who excited his hate? 

He looked long at Lacrima, as she stood with 
Gladys, under a sycamore, waiting his approach. It 
was curious, he said to himself, — very curious, — the 
sort of feelings she excited in him. It was not that 
he wished to possess her. He was scornfully cynical 



188 WOOD AND STONE 

of that sort of gratification. He wished to do more 
than possess her. He wished to humiliate her, to 
degrade her, to put her to shame in her inmost spirit. 
He wished her to know that he knew that she was 
suffering this shame, and that he was the cause of it. 
He wished her to feel herself absolutely in his power, 
not bodily — that was nothing ! — but morally, and 
spiritually. 

The owner of Leo's Hill had the faculty of de- 
taching himself from his own darkest thoughts, and 
of observing them with a humourous and cynical eye. 
It struck him as not a little grotesque, that he, the 
manipulater of far-flung financial intrigues, the am- 
bitious politician, the formidable captain of industry, 
should be thus scheming and plotting to satisfy the 
caprice of a mere whim, upon the destiny of a 
penniless dependent. It was grotesque — grotesque 
and ridiculous. Let it be! The whole business of 
living was grotesque and ridiculous. One snatched 
fiercely at this thing or the other, as the world moved 
round; and one was not bound always to present 
oneself in a dignified mask before one's own tribunal. 
It was enough that this or that fantasy of the domi- 
nant power-instinct demanded a certain course of 
action. Let it be as grotesque as it might! He, and 
none other, was the judge of his pleasure, of what he 
pleased to do, or to refrain from doing. It was his 
humour; — and that ended it! He lived to fulfil his 
humour. There was nothing else to live for, in this 
fantastic chaotic world! Meditating in this manner 
he approached the girls. 

"It occurred to me," he said, breathing a little 
hard, and addressing his daughter, "that you might 



THE ORCHARD 189 

be seeing Mr. Clavering again tonight. If so, per- 
haps you would give him a message from me, or 
rather, — how shall I put it? — a suggestion, a 
gentle hint." 

"What are you driving at, father?" asked Gladys, 
pouting her lips and swinging her parasol. 

"It is a message best delivered by mouth," Mr. 
Romer went on, "and by your mouth." 

Then as if to turn this last remark into a delicate 
compliment, he playfully lifted up the girl's chin 
with his finger and made as if to kiss her. Gladys, 
however, lightly evaded him, and tossing her head 
mischievously, burst out laughing. "I know you, 
father, I know you," she cried. "You want me to 
do some intriguing for you. You never kiss me like 
that, unless you do!" 

Lacrima glanced apprehensively at the two of 
them. Standing there, in the midst of that charming 
English scene, they represented to her mind all that 
was remorseless, pitiless and implacable in this island 
of her enforced adoption. Swiftly, from those ruddy 
pinnacles of the great house behind them, her mind 
reverted to the little white huts in a certain Apennine 
valley and the tinkling bells of the goats led back 
from pasture. Oh how she hated all this heavy 
foliage and these eternally murmuring doves! 

"Well," said Mr. Romer, as Gladys waited mock- 
ingly, "I do want you to do something. I want you 
to hint to our dear clergyman that this ceremony 
of your reception into his church is dependent upon 
his good behaviour. Not your good behavior," he 
repeated smiling, "but his. The truth is, dear child, 
if I may speak quite plainly, I know the persuasive 



190 WOOD AND STONE 

power of your pretty face over all these young men; 
and I want you to make it plain to this worthy 
priest that if you are to continue being nice to him, 
he must be very nice to me. Do you catch my mean- 
ing, my plump little bird?" As he spoke he encircled 
her waist with his arm. Lacrima, watching them, 
thought how singularly alike father and daughter 
were, and was conscious of an instinctive desire to 
run and warn this new victim of conspiracy. 

"Why, what has he been doing, father?" asked 
the fair girl, shaking herself free, and opening her 
parasol. 

"He has been supporting that fellow Wone. And 
he has been talking nonsense about Quincunx, — yes, 
about your friend Quincunx," he added, nodding 
ironically towards Lacrima. 

"And I am to punish him, am I?" laughed Gladys. 
"That is lovely! I love punishing people, especially 
people like Mr. Clavering who think they are so 
wonderfully good!" 

Mr. Romer smiled. "Not exactly punish him, 
dear, but lead him gently into the right path. Lead 
him, in fact, to see that the party to belong to in 
this village is the party of capacity — not the party 
of chatter." 

Gladys looked at her father seriously. "You don't 
mean that you are actually afraid of losing this elec- 
tion?" she said. Mr. Romer stretched out his arm 
and rested himself against the umbrageous sycamore, 
pressing his large firm hand upon its trunk. 

"Losing it, child? No, I shan't lose it. But these 
idiots do really annoy me. They are all such cowards 
and such sentimental babies. It is people like these who 



THE ORCHARD 191 

have to be ruled with a firm hand. They cringe and 
whimper when you talk to them; and then the moment 
your back is turned they grow voluble and imperti- 
nent. My workmen are no better. They owe every- 
thing to me. If it wasn't for me, half those quarries 
would be shut down tomorrow and they'd be out of 
a job. But do you think they are grateful? Not 
a bit of it!" His tone grew more angry. He felt 
a need of venting the suppressed rage of many 
months. "Yes, you needn't put on that unconscious 
look, Lacrima. I know well enough where your 
sympathies lie. The fact is, in these rotten days, 
it is the incapable and miserable who give the tone 
to everyone! No one thinks for himself. No one 
goes to the bottom of things. It is all talk — talk — 
talk; talk about equality, about liberty, about kind- 
ness to the weak. I hate the weak; and I refuse to 
let them interfere with me! Look at the faces of these 
people. Well, — you know, Gladys, what they are 
like. They are all feeble, bloodless, sneaking, fawn- 
ing idiots! I hate the faces of these Nevilton fools. 
They are always making me think of slugs and worms. 
This Wone is ' typical. His disgusting complexion 
and flabby mouth is characteristic of them all. No 
one of them has the spirit to hit one properly back, 
face to face. And their odious, sentimental religion! — 
This Clavering of yours ought to know better. He 
is not quite devoid of intelligence. He showed some 
spirit when I talked with him. But he is besotted, 
too, with this silly nonsense about humouring the 
people, and considering the people, and treating the 
people in a Christian spirit! As though you could 
treat worms and slugs in any other spirit than the 



192 WOOD AND STONE 

spirit of trampling upon them. They are born to be 
trampled upon — born for it — I tell you ! You have 
only to look at them!" He glared forth over the 
soft rich fields; and continued, still more bitterly: 

"Its no good your pretending not to hear me, 
Lacrimal I can read your thoughts like an open 
book. You are quoting to yourself, no doubt, at 
this very moment, some of the pretty speeches of 
your friend Quincunx. A nice fellow, he is, for a 
girl's teacher! A fellow with no idea of his own in 
his head! A fellow afraid to raise his eyes above 
one's boot-laces! Why the other day, when I was 
out shooting and met him in the lane, he turned 
straight round, and walked back on his tracks — 
simply f ro n fear of passing me. I hate these sneak- 
ing cowards! I hate their cunning, miserable, little 
ways! I should like to trample them all out of 
existence! That is the worst of being strong in this 
world. One is worried to death by a lot of fools who 
are not worth the effort spent on them." 

Lacrima uttered no word, but looked sadly away, 
over the fair landscape. In her heart, in spite of her 
detestation of the man, she felt a strange fantastic 
sympathy with a good deal of what he said. Women, 
especially women of Latin races, have no great respect 
for democratic sentiments when they do not issue in 
definite deeds. Her private idea of a revolutionary 
leader was something very far removed from the 
voluble local candidate, and she had suffered too 
much herself from the frail petulance of Maurice 
Quincunx not to feel a secret longing that somewhere, 
somehow, this aggressive tyrant should be faced by a 
strength as firm, as capable, as fearless, as his own. 



THE ORCHARD 193 

Mr. Romer, with his swarthy imperial face and 
powerful figure, seemed to her, as he leant against 
the tree, so to impress himself upon that yielding 
landscape, that there appeared reason enough for his 
complaint that he could find no antagonist worthy 
of his steel. In the true manner of a Pariah, who 
turns, with swift contempt, upon her own class, the 
girl was conscious of a rising tide of revolt in her 
heart against the incompetent weakness of her friend. 
What would she not give to be able, even once, to 
see this man outfaced and outwitted! She was im- 
pressed too, poor girl, as she shrank silently aside 
from his sarcasm, by the horrible indifference of these 
charming sunlit fields to the brutality of the man's 
challenge. They cared nothing — nothing ! It was 
impossible to make them care. Hundreds of years 
ago they had slumbered, just as dreamily, just as 
indifferently, as they did now. If even at this 
moment she were to plunge a knife into the man's 
heart, so that he fell a mass of senseless clay at her 
feet, that impervious wood-pigeon would go on mur- 
muring its monotonous ditty, just as peacefully, just 
as serenely! There was something really terrifying 
to her in this callous indifference of Nature. It was 
like living perpetually in close contact with a person 
who was deaf and dumb and blind; and who, while 
the most tragic events were being transacted, went 
on cheerfully and imperturbably humming some merry 
tune. It would be almost better, thought the girl, 
if that tree-trunk against which the quarry-owner 
pressed his heavy hand were really in league with 
him. Anything were better than this smiling indif- 
ference which seemed to keep on repeating in a voice 



194 WOOD AND STONE 

as monotonous as the pigeon's — "Everything is 
permitted. Nothing is forbidden. Nothing is for- 
bidden. Everything is permitted." like the silly 
reiterated whirring of some monstrous placid shuttle. 
It was strange, the rebellious inconsistent thoughts, 
which passed through her mind! She wondered why 
Hugh Clavering was thus to be waylaid and per- 
suaded. Had he dared to rise in genuine opposition? 
No, she did not believe it. He had probably talked 
religion, just as Maurice talked anarchy and Wone 
talked socialism. It was all talk! Romer was quite 
right. They had no spirit in them, these English 
people. She thought of the fierce atheistic rebels of 
her own country. They, at any rate, understood that 
evil had to be resisted by action, and not by vague 
protestations of unctuous sentiment! 

When Mr. Romer left them and returned to his 
seat on the terrace, the girls did not at once proceed 
on their way, but waited, hesitating; and amused 
themselves by pulling down the lower branches of a 
lime and trying to anticipate the sweetness of its yet 
unbudded fragrance. 

"Let's stroll down the drive first," said Gladys 
presently, "till we are out of sight, and then we can 
cross the mill mead and get into the orchard that 
way." They followed this design with elaborate 
caution, and only when quite concealed from the 
windows of the house, turned quickly northward and 
left the park for the orchards. Between the wall, 
of the north garden and the railway, lay some of the 
oldest and least frequented of these shadowy places, 
completely out of the ordinary paths of traffic, and 
only accessible by field-ways. Into the smallest and 



THE ORCHARD 195 

most secluded of all these the girls wandered, gliding 
noiselessly between the thick hedges and heavy grass, 
like two frail phantoms of the upper world visiting 
some Elysian solitude. 

Gladys laid her hand on her companion's arm. 
"We had better wait here," she said, "where we can 
see the whole orchard. They ought to know, by now, 
where to come." 

They seated themselves on the bowed trunk of an 
ancient apple-tree that by long decline had at last 
reached a horizontal position. The flowering season 
was practically over, though here and there a late 
cider-tree, growing more in shadow than the rest, 
still carried its delicate burden of clustered blossoms. 

"How many times is it that we have met them 
here?" whispered the fair girl, snatching off her hat 
and tossing it on the grass. "This is the fifth time, 
isn't it? What dear things they are! I think its 
much more exciting, this sort of thing, — don't you? 
— than dull tennis parties with silly idiots like young 
Ilminster." 

The Italian nodded. "It is a good thing that 
James and I get on so well," she said. "It would 
be awkward if we were as afraid of one another as 
when we first met." 

Gladys put her hand caressingly on her companion's 
knee and looked into her face with a slow seductive 
smile. 

"You are forgetting your Mr. Quincunx a little, 
just a little, these days, aren't you, darling? Don't 
be shy, now — or look cross. You know you are! 
You can't deny it. Your boy is almost as nice as 
mine. He doesn't like me, though. I can see that! 



196 WOOD AND STONE 

But I like him. I like him awfully! You'd better 
take care, child. If ever I get tired of my Luke — " 

"James isn't a boy," protested Lacrima. 

"Silly!" cried Gladys. "Of course he is. Who 
cares about age? They are ail the same. I always 
call them boys when they attract me. I like the 
word. I like to say it. It makes me feel as if I 
were one of those girls in London. You know what I 
mean!" 

Lacrima looked at her gravely. "I always feel as 
if James Andersen were much older than I," she said. 

"But your Mr. Quincunx," repeated the fair 
creature, slipping her soft fingers into her friend's 
hand, "your Mr. Quincunx is not quite what he was 
to you, before we began these adventures?" 

"I wish you wouldn't say that, Gladys!" rejoined 
the Italian, freeing her hands and clasping them 
passionately together. "It is wicked of you to say 
that! You know I only talk to James so that you 
can do what you like. I shall always be Maurice's 
friend. I shall be his friend to the last!" 

Gladys laughed merrily. "That is what I wanted," 
she retorted. "I wanted to make you burst out. 
When people burst out, they are always doubtful in 
their hearts. Ah, little puritan! so we are already in 
the position of having two sweethearts, are we? — and 
not knowing which of the two we really like best? 
That is a very pretty situation to be in. It is where 
we all are! I hope you enjoy it!" 

Lacrima let her hands fall helplessly to her side, 
against the grey bark of the apple-tree. "Why do 
you hate Mr. Quincunx so?" she asked, looking 
gravely into her friend's face. 



THE ORCHARD 197 

"Why do I hate him?" said Gladys. "Oh, I really 
don't know! I didn't know I did. If I do, it's 
because he's such a weak wretched creature. He has 
no more spirit than a sick dog. He talks such non- 
sense too! I am glad he has to walk to Yeoborough 
every day and do a little work. You ought to be 
glad too! He could never marry if he didn't make 
some money." 

"He doesn't want to marry," murmured Lacrima. 
"He only wants to be left alone." 

"A nice friend he seems to be," cried the other, 
"for a girl like you! I suppose he kisses you and that 
sort of thing, doesn't he? I shouldn't like to be 
kissed by a silly old man like that, with a great 
stupid beard." 

"You mustn't say these things to me, Gladys, you 
mustn't! I won't hear them. Mr. Quincunx isn't 
an old man! He is younger than James Andersen. 
He is not forty yet." 

"He looks fifty, if he looks a day," said Gladys, 
"and the colour of his beard is disgusting! It's like 
dirty water. Fancy having a horrid thing like that 
pressed against your face! And I suppose he cries 
and slobbers over you, doesn't he? I have seen him 
cry. I hate a man who cries. He cried the other 
night, — father told me so — when he found he had 
spent all his money." 

Lacrima got up and walked a few paces away. 
She loathed this placid golden-haired creature, at that 
moment, so intensely, that it was all she could do to 
refrain from leaping upon her and burying her teeth 
in her soft neck. She leant against one of the trees 
and pressed her head upon its grey lichen. Gladys 



198 WOOD AND STONE 

slipped down into a more luxurious position. She 
looked complacently around her. No spot could have 
been better adapted for a romantic encounter. 

The gnarled and time-worn trunks of the old apple- 
trees, each looking as if it had lingered there, full of 
remote memories, from an age coeval with the age of 
those very druids whose sacred mistletoe still clung 
in patches to their boughs, formed a strange fantastic 
array of twisted and distorted natural pillars, upon 
which the foliage, meeting everywhere above their 
heads, leaned in shadowy security, like the roof of a 
heathen temple. The buttercups and cuckoo-flowers, 
which, here and there, sprinkled the heavy grass, 
were different from those in the open meadows. 
The golden hue of the one, and the lavender tint of 
the other, took on, in this diurnal gloom, a chilly and 
tender pallour, both colours approximating to white. 
The grey lichen hung down in loose festoons from the 
higher portions of the knotted trunks, and crept, 
thick and close, round the moss at their roots. There 
could hardly be conceived a spot more suggestive of 
absolute and eternal security than this Hesperidean 
enclosure. 

The very fact of the remote but constant presence 
of humanity there, as a vague dreamy background of 
immemorial tending, increased this sense. One felt 
that the easy invasions of grafting-time and gathering- 
time, returning perennially in their seasons, only 
intensified the long delicious solitudes of the intervals 
between, when, in rich, hushed languor, the blossoms 
bud and bloom and fall; and the fruit ripens and 
sweetens; and the leaves flutter down. That ex- 
quisite seductive charm, the charm of places full of 



THE ORCHARD 199 

quietness, yet bordering on the edge of the days' 
labour, hung like a heavy atmosphere of contentment 
over the shadowy aisles of this temple of peace. The 
wood-pigeons keep up a perpetual murmur, all the 
summer long, in these untrodden spots. No eyes see 
them. It is as though they never saw one another. 
But their drowsy liturgical repetitions answer and 
answer again, as if from the unfathomable depths of 
some dim green underworld, worshipping the gods of 
silence with sounds that give silence itself a richer, a 
fuller weight. 

"There they are!" cried Gladys suddenly, as the 
figures of the Andersen brothers made themselves 
visible on the further side of the orchard. 

The girls advanced to meet them through the thick 
grass, swinging their summer-hats in their hands and 
bending their heads, now and then, to avoid the 
over-hanging boughs. The meeting between these 
four persons would have made a pleasant and appro- 
priate subject for one of those richly-coloured old- 
fashioned prints which one sometimes observes in 
early Victorian parlours. Gladys grew quite pale with 
excitement, and her voice assumed a vibrant tender- 
ness when she accosted Luke, which made Lacrima 
give a little start of surprise, as she shook hands with 
the elder brother. Had her persecutor then, got, 
after all, some living tissue in the place where the 
heart beat? 

Luke's manner had materially altered since he had 
submitted so urbanely to the fair girl's insulting airs 
at the close of their first encounter. His way of 
treating her now was casual, flippant, abrupt — 
almost indifferent. Instead of following the pathetic 



200 WOOD AND STONE 

pressure of her arm and hand, which at once bade 
him hasten the separation of the group, he deliberately- 
lingered, chatting amicably with Lacrima and asking 
her questions about Italy. It seemed that the plausi- 
ble Luke knew quite as much about Genoa and 
Florence and Venice as his more taciturn brother, and 
all he knew he was well able to turn into effective 
use. He was indeed a most engaging and irresistible 
conversationalist; and Gladys grew paler and paler, 
as she watched the animation of his face and listened 
to his pleasant and modulated voice. 

It caused sheer suffering to her fiercely impetuous 
nature, this long-drawn out delay. Every moment 
that passed diminished the time they would have 
together. Her nerves ached for the touch of his 
arms about her, and a savage desire to press her 
mouth to his, and satiate herself with kisses, throbbed 
in her every vein. Why would he not stop this 
irrelevant stream of talk? What did she care about 
the narrow streets of Genoa, — or the encrusted 
facade of San Marco? It had been their custom to 
separate immediately on meeting, and for Luke to 
carry her off to a charming hiding-place they had 
discovered. With the fierce pantherish craving of a 
love-scorched animal her soul cried out to be clasped 
close to her friend in this secluded spot, having her 
will of those maddening youthful lips with their proud 
Grecian curve! Still he must go on talking! 

James and Lacrima, lending themselves, naturally 
and easily, to the mood of the moment, were already 
seated at the foot of a twisted and ancestral apple- 
tree. Soon Luke, still absorbed in his conversation 
with the Italian, shook off Gladys' arm and settled 



THE ORCHARD 201 

himself beside them, plucking a handful of grass, as 
he did so, and inhaling its fragrance with sybarite 
pleasure. 

"St. Mark's is the only church in the world for 
me," Luke was saying. "I have pictures of it from 
every conceivable angle. It is quite a mania with me 
collecting such things. I have dozens of them; 
haven't I, James?" 

"Do you mean those postcards father sent home 
when he went over there to work?" answered the 
elder brother, one of whose special peculiarities was 
a curious pleasure in emphasizing, in the presence of 
the "upper classes," the humility of his origin. 

Luke laughed. "Well — yes — those — and others," 
he said. " You haven't the least idea what I keep 
in my drawer of secret treasures; you know you 
haven't! I've got some lovely letters there among 
other things. Letters that I wouldn't let anyone see 
for the world!" He glanced smilingly at Gladys, who 
was pacing up and down in front of them, like a 
beautiful tigress. 

"Look here, my friends," she said. "The time is 
slipping away frightfully. We are not going to sit 
here all the while, are we, talking nonsense, like 
people at a garden party?" 

"It's so lovely here," said Luke with a slow smile. 
"I really don't think that your favourite corner is so 
much nicer. I am in no hurry to move. Are you, 
Miss Traffio?" 

Lacrima saw a look upon her cousin's face that 
boded ill for their future relations if she did not 
make some kind of effort. She rose to her feet. 

"Come, Mr. Andersen," she said, giving James a 



202 WOOD AND STONE 

wistful look. "Let us take a little stroll, and then 
return again to these young people." 

James rose obediently, and they walked off to- 
gether. They passed from the orchards belonging to 
Mr. Romer's tenant, and entered those immediately 
at the foot of the vicarage garden. Here, through a 
gap in the hedge they were attracted by the sight of 
a queer bed of weeds growing at the edge of a potato- 
patch. They were very curious weeds, rather re- 
sembling sea-plants than land-plants; in colour of a 
dull glaucous green, and in shape grotesquely elon- 
gated. 

"What are those things?" said Lacrima. "I think 
I have never seen such evil-looking plants. Why do 
they let them grow there?" 

James surveyed the objects. "They certainly have 
a queer look," he said, "but you know, in old days, 
there was a grave-yard here, of a peculiar kind. It 
is only in the last fifty years that they have dug it 
up and included it in this garden." 

Lacrima shuddered. "I would not eat those po- 
tatoes for anything! You know I think I come to 
dislike more and more the look of your English vege- 
table gardens, with their horrid, heavy leaves, so 
damp and oozy and disgusting!" 

"I agree with you there," returned the wood- 
carver. "I have always hated Nevilton, and every 
aspect of it; but I think I hate these overgrown 
gardens most of all." 

"They look as if they were fed from churchyards, 
don't they?" went on the girl. "Look at those 
heavy laurel bushes over there, and those dreadful 
fir-trees! I should cut them all down if this place 



THE ORCHARD 203 

belonged to me. Oh, how I long for olives and vine- 
yards! These orchards are all very well, but they 
seem to me as if they were made to keep out the sun 
and the wholesome air." 

James Andersen smiled grimly. "Orchards and 
potato gardens!" he muttered. "Yes, these are typi- 
cal of this country of clay. And these vicarage shrub- 
beries! I think a shrubbery is the last limit of 
depression and desolation. I am sure all the murders 
committed in this country are planned in shrubberies, 
and under the shade of damp laurel-bushes." 

"In our country we grow corn between the fruit- 
trees," said Lacrima. 

"Yes, corn — " returned Andersen, "corn and wine 
and oil! Those are the natural, the beautiful, 
products of the earth. Things that are fed upon sun 
and air — not upon the bones of the dead ! All these 
Nevilton places, however luxuriant, seem to me to 
smell of death." 

"But was this corner really a churchyard?" asked 
the Italian. "I hope Mrs. Seldom won't stroll down 
this way and see us!" 

"Mrs. Seldom is well suited to the place she lives 
in," returned the other. "She lives upon the Past, 
just as her garden does — just as her potatoes do! 
These English vicarages are dreadful places. They 
have all the melancholy of age without its historic 
glamour. And^ how morbid they are! Any of your 
cheerful Latin cures would die in them, simply of 
damp and despair." 

"But do tell me about this spot," repeated La- 
crima, with a little shiver. "Why did you say it 
was a peculiar churchyard?" 



204 WOOD AND STONE 

"It was the place where they buried unbaptized 
children," answered Andersen, and added, in a lower 
tone, "how cold it is getting! It must be the shadow 
we are in." 

"But you haven't yet," murmured Lacrima, "you 
haven't yet told me, what those weeds are." 

"Well — we call them ' mares'-tails ' about here," 
answered the stone-carver, "I don't know their 
proper name." 

"But why don't they dig them up? Look! They 
are growing all among the potatoes." 

"They can't dig them up," returned the man. 
"They can't get at their roots. They are the worst 
and most obstinate weed there is. They grow in all 
the Nevilton gardens. They are the typical Nevilton 
flora. They must have grown here in the days of 
the druids." 

"But how absurd!" cried Lacrima. "I feel as if 
I could pull them up with my hands. The earth 
looks so soft." 

"The earth is soft enough," replied Andersen, "but 
the roots of these weeds adhere fast to the rock 
underneath. The rock, you know, the sandstone 
rock, lies only a short distance beneath our feet." 

"The same stone as Nevilton house is built of?" 

"Certainly the same. Our stone, Mr. Romer's 
stone, the stone upon which we all live here -7 except 
those who till the fields." 

"I hate the thing!" cried Lacrima, in curious 
agitation. 

"You do? Well — to tell you the honest truth, 
so do I. I associate it with my father." 

"I associate it with Gladys," whispered Lacrima. 



THE ORCHARD 205 

"I can believe it. We both associate it with 
houses of tyranny, of wretched persecution. Perhaps 
I have never told you that my father was directly 
the cause of my mother's death?" 

"You have hinted it," murmured the girl. "I 
suspected it. But Luke loves the stone, doesn't he? 
He always speaks as if the mere handling of it, in his 
workshop, gave him exquisite pleasure." 

"A great many things give Luke exquisite pleasure," 
returned the other grimly. "Luke lives for exquisite 
pleasure." 

A quick step on the grass behind them made them 
swing suddenly round. It was Vennie Seldom, who, 
unobserved, had been watching them from the 
vicarage terrace. A few paces behind her came Mr. 
Taxater, walking cautiously and deliberately, with 
the air of a Lord Chesterfield returning from an 
audience at St. James'. Mr. Taxater had already 
met the Italian on one or two occasions. He had 
sat next to her once, when dining at Nevilton House, 
and he was considerably interested in her. 

"What a lovely evening, Miss Traffio," said Vennie 
shyly, but without embarrassment. Vennie was 
always shy, but nothing ever interfered with her 
self-possession. 

"I am glad you are showing Mr. Andersen these 
orchards of ours. I always think they are the most 
secluded place in the whole village." 

"Ha!" said Mr. Taxater, when he had greeted 
them with elaborate and friendly courtesy, "I thought 
you two were bound to make friends sooner or later! 
I call you my two companions in exile, among our 
dear Anglo-Saxons. Miss Traffio I know is Latin, 



206 WOOD AND STONE 

and you, sir, must have some kind of foreign blood. 
I am right, am I not, Mr. Andersen?" 

James looked at him humorously, though a little 
grimly. He was always pleased to be addressed by 
Mr. Taxater, as indeed was everybody who knew him. 
The great scholar's detached intellectualism gave him 
an air of complete aloofness from all social distinctions. 

"Perhaps I may have," he answered. "My 
mother used to hint at something of the kind. She 
was always very fond of foreign books. I rather 
fancy that I once heard her say something about a 
strain of Spanish blood." 

"I thought so! I thought so!" cried Mr. Taxater, 
pulling his hat over his eyes and protruding his 
chin and under-lip, in the manner peculiar to him 
when especially pleased. 

"I thought there was something Spanish in you. 
How extraordinarily interesting! Spain, — there is no 
country like it in the world! You must go to Spain, 
Mr. Andersen. You would go there in a different spirit 
from these wretched sight-seers who carry their own 
vulgarity with them. • You would go with that feeling 
of reverence for the great things of civilization, which 
is inseparable from the least drop of Latin blood." 

"Would you like to see Spain, Miss Traffio? en- 
quired Vennie. "Mr. Taxater, I notice, always leaves 
out us women, when he makes his attractive pro- 
posals. I think he thinks that we have no capacity 
for understanding this civilization he talks of." 

"I think you understand everything, better than 
any man could," murmured Lacrima, conscious of an 
extraordinary depth of sympathy emanating from 
this frail figure. 



THE ORCHARD 207 

"Miss Seldom has been trying to make me appre- 
ciate the beauty of these orchards," went on Mr. 
Taxater, addressing James. "But I am afraid I am 
not very easily converted. I have a prejudice against 
orchards. For some reason or other, I associate 
them with dragons and serpents." 

"Miss Seldom has every reason to love the beautiful 
aspects of our Nevilton scenery," said the stone- 
carver. "Her ancestors possessed all these fields and 
orchards so long, that it would be strange if their 
descendant did not have an instinctive passion for 
them." He uttered these words with that curious 
undertone of bitterness which marked all his refer- 
ences to aristocratic pretension. 

Little Vennie brushed the sarcasm gently aside, as 
if it had been a fluttering moth. 

"Yes, I do love them in a sense," she said, "but 
you must remember that I, too, was educated in a 
Latin country. So, you see, we four are all outsiders 
and heretics! I fancy your brother, Mr. Andersen, is 
an ingrained Neviltonian." 

James smiled in a kindly, almost paternal manner, 
at the little descendant of the Tudor courtiers. Her 
sweetness and artless goodness made him feel ashamed 
of his furtive truculence. 

"I wish you would come in and see my mother and 
me, one of these evenings," said Vennie, looking 
rather wistfully at Lacrima and putting a more tender 
solicitation into her tone than the mere words implied. 

Lacrima hesitated. "I am afraid I cannot promise," 
she said nervously. "My cousin generally wants me 
in the evening." 

"Perhaps," put in Mr. Taxater, with his most 



208 WOOD AND STONE 

Talleyrand-like air, "a similar occasion to the present 
one may arise again, when with Mr. Andersen's permis- 
sion, we may all adjourn to the vicarage garden." 

Lacrima, rather uncomfortably, looked down at the 
grass. 

"We four, being, as we have admitted, all outsiders 
here," went on the diplomatist, "ought to have no 
secrets from one another. I think" — he looked at 
Vennie — "we may just as well confess to our friends 
that we quite realize the little — charming — ' friend- 
ship,' shall I say? — that has sprung up between this 
gentleman's brother and Miss Romer." 

"I think," said James Andersen hurriedly, in order 
to relieve Lacrima's embarrassment, "I think the 
real bond between Luke and Miss Gladys is their 
mutual pleasure in all this luxuriant scenery. Some- 
how I feel as if you, Sir, and Miss Seldom, were quite 
separate from it and outside it." 

"Yes," cried Vennie eagerly, "and Lacrima is 
outside it, because she is half-Italian, and you are 
outside it because you are half -Spanish." 

"It is clear, then," said Mr. Taxater, "that we 
four must form a sort of secret alliance, an alliance 
based upon the fact that even Miss Seldom's lovely 
orchards do not altogether make us forget what 
civilization means!" 

Neither of the two girls seemed quite to understand 
what the theologian implied, but Andersen shot at 
him a gleam of appreciative gratitude. 

"I was telling Miss Traffio," he said, "that under 
this grass, not very many feet down, a remarkable 
layer of sandstone obtrudes itself." 

"An orchard based on rock," murmured Mr. 



THE ORCHARD 209 

Taxater, "that, I think, is an admirable symbol of 
what this place represents. Clay at the top and 
sandstone at the bottom! I wonder whether it is 
better, in this world, to be clay or stone? We four 
poor foreigners have, I suspect, a preference for a 
material very different from both of these. Our 
element would be marble. Eh, Andersen? Marble 
that can resist all these corrupting natural forces and 
throw them back, and hold them down. I always 
think that marble is the appropriate medium of 
civilization's retort to instinct and savagery. The 
Latin races have always built in marble. It was 
certainly of marble that our Lord was thinking when 
he used his celebrated metaphor about the founding 
of the Church." 

The stone-carver made no answer. He had noticed 
a quick supplicating glance from Lacrima's dark eyes. 

"Well," — he said, "I think I must be looking for 
my brother, and I expect our young lady is waiting 
for Miss Traffic" 

They bade their friends good-night and moved off. 

"I am always at your service," were Mr. Taxater's 
last words, "if ever either of you care to appeal to 
the free-masonry of the children of marble against 
the children of clay." 

As they retraced their steps Andersen remarked to 
his companion how curious it was, that neither Vennie 
nor Mr. Taxater seemed in the least aware of any- 
thing extraordinary or unconventional in this surrep- 
titious friendship between the girls from the House 
and their father's workmen. 

"Yes, I wonder what Mrs. Seldom would think of 
us," rejoined Lacrima, "but she probably thinks 



210 WOOD AND STONE 

Gladys is capable of anything and that I am as bad 
as she is. But I do like that little Vennie! I believe 
she is a real saint. She gives me such a queer feel- 
ing of being different from everyone." 

"Mr. Taxater no doubt is making a convert of 
her," said the stone-carver. "And I have a suspicion 
that he hopes to convert Gladys too, probably through 
your influence." 

"I don't like to think that of him," replied the 
girl. "He seems to me to admire Vennie for herself 
and to be kind to us for ourselves. I think he is a 
thoroughly good man." 

"Possibly — possibly," muttered James, "but I 
don't trust him. I never have trusted him." 

They said no more, and threaded their way slowly 
through the orchard to the place where they had 
left the others. The wind had dropped and there was 
a dull, obstinate expectancy in the atmosphere. 
Every leaf and grass blade seemed to be intently 
alert and listening. 

In her heart Lacrima was conscious of an unusual 
sense of foreboding and apprehension. Surely there 
could be nothing worse in store for her than what 
she already suffered. She wondered what Maurice 
Quincunx was doing at that moment. Was he think- 
ing of her, and were his thoughts the cause of this 
strange oppression in the air? Poor Maurice! She 
longed to be free to devote herself to him, to smooth 
his path, to distract his mind. Would fate ever 
make such a thing possible? How unfair Gladys was 
in her suspicions! 

She liked James Andersen and was very grateful to 
him, but he did not need her as Maurice needed her! 



THE ORCHARD 211 

"I see them!" she cried suddenly. "But how odd 
they look! They're not speaking a word. Have 
they quarrelled, I wonder?" 

The two fair-haired amorists appeared indeed 
extremely gloomy and melancholy, as they sat, with 
a little space between them, on the fallen tree. They 
rose with an air of relief at the others' approach. 

"I thought you were never coming," said Gladys. 
"How long you have been! We have been waiting 
for hours. Come along. We must go straight back 
and dress or we shall be late for dinner. No time 
for good-byes! Au revoir, you two! Come along, 
girl, quick! We'd better run." 

She seized her cousin's hand and dragged her off 
and they were quickly out of sight. 

The two brothers watched them disappear and 
then turned and walked away together. "Don't 
let's go home yet," said Luke. "Let's go to the 
churchyard first. The sun will have set, but it won't 
be dark for a long time. And I love the churchyard 
in the twilight." 

James nodded. "It is our garden, isn't it, — and 
our orchard? It is the only spot in Nevilton where 
no one can interfere with us." 

"That, and the Seldom Arms," added the younger 
brother. 

They paced side by side in silence till they reached 
the road. The orchards, left to themselves, relapsed 
into their accustomed reserve. Whatever secrets 
they concealed of the confused struggles of ephemeral 
mortals, they concealed in inviolable discretion. 



CHAPTER XI 
ART AND NATURE 

THE early days of June, all of them of the same 
quality of golden weather, were hardly over, 
before our wanderer from Ohio found himself 
on terms of quite pleasant familiarity with the 
celibate vicar of Nevilton, whose relations with his 
friend Gladys so immensely interested him. 

The conscientious vicar had sought him out, on 
the very day after his visit to the mill copse and 
the artist had found the priest more to his fancy 
than he had imagined possible. 

The American's painting had begun in serious 
earnest. A studio had been constructed for him in 
one of the sheds near the conservatory, a place much 
more full of light and air and pleasant garden smells, 
than would have been the lumber-room referred to by 
Mrs. Romer, adjoining the chaste slumbers of the 
laborious Lily. Here for several long mornings he 
had worked at high pressure and in a vein of imagina- 
tive expansion. 

Something of the seething sap of these incomparable 
days seemed to pass into his blood. He plunged into 
a bold and original series of Dionysic "impressions," 
seeking to represent, in accordance with his new vision, 
those legendary episodes in the life of the divine 
Wanderer which seemed most capable of lending 



ART AND NATURE 213 

themselves to a half-realistic, half-fantastic trans- 
mutation, of the people and places immediately 
around him. He sought to introduce into these 
pictures the very impetus and pressure of the exuber- 
ant earth-force, as he felt it stirring and fermenting 
in his own veins, and in those of the persons and 
animals about him. He strove to clothe the shadowy 
poetic outline of the classical story with fragments 
and morsels of actual experience as one by one his 
imaginative intellect absorbed them. 

Here, too, under the sycamores and elms of Ne- 
vilton, the old world-madness followed the alternations 
of sun and moon, with the same tragic swiftness and 
the same ambiguous beauty, as when, with tossing 
arms and bared throats, the virgins of Thessaly flung 
themselves into the dew-starred thickets. 

Dangelis began by making cautious and tentative 
use of such village children as he found it possible 
to lay hands upon, as models in his work, but this 
method did not prove very satisfactory. 

The children, when their alarm and inqusitiveness 
wore off, grew tired and turbulent; and on more than 
one occasion the artist had to submit to astonish- 
ing visits from confused and angry parents who 
called him a "foreigner" and a "Yankee," and 
qualified these appelations with epithets so astound- 
ingly gross, that Dangelis was driven to wonder 
from what simple city-bred fancy the illusion of rural 
innocence had first proceeded. 

At length, as the days went on, the bold idea 
came into his head of persuading Gladys herself to 
act as his model. 

His relations with her had firmly established them- 



214 WOOD AND STONE 

selves now on the secure ground of playful camara- 
derie, and he knew enough of her to feel tolerably 
certain that he had only to broach such a scheme, 
to have it welcomed with enthusiastic ardour. 

He made the suggestion one evening as they walked 
home together after her spiritual lesson. "I find 
that last picture of mine extremely difficult to man- 
age," he said. 

"Why! I think its the best of them all!" cried 
Gladys. "You've got a lovely look of longing in the 
eyes of your queer god; and the sail of Theseus' ship, 
as you see it against the blue sea, is wonderful. The 
little bushes and things, too, you've put in; I like 
them particularly. They remind me of that wood 
down by the mill, where I caught the thrush. I 
suppose you've forgotten all about that day," she 
added, giving him a quick sidelong glance. 

The artist seized his opportunity. "They would 
remind you still more of our wood," he said eagerly, 
"if you let me put you in as Ariadne! Do, Gladys," 
— he had called her Gladys for some days — "you 
will make a simply adorable Ariadne. As she is 
now, she is wooden, grotesque, archaic — nothing 
but drapery and white ankles!" 

The girl had flushed with pleasure as soon as she 
caught the drift of his request. Now she glanced 
mischievously and mockingly at him. 

"My ankles," she murmured laughing, "are not 
so very, very beautiful!" 

"Please be serious, Gladys," he said, "I am really 
quite in earnest. It will just make the difference 
between a masterpiece and a fiasco." 

"You are very conceited," she retorted teasingly, 



ART AND NATURE 215 

"but I suppose I oughtn't to say that, ought I, as 
my precious ankles are to be a part of this master- 
piece r 

She ran in front of him down the drive, and, as 
if to give him an exhibition of her goddess-like agility, 
caught at an over-hanging bough and swung herself 
backwards and forwards. 

"What fun!" she cried, as he approached. "Of 
course I'll do it, Mr. Dangelis." Then, with a sudden 
change of tone and a very malign expression, as she 
let the branch swing back and resumed her place at 
his side, "Mr. Clavering must see me posing for you. 
He must say whether he thinks I'm good enough 
for Ariadne." 

The artist looked a shade disconcerted by this 
unexpected turn to the project, but he was too anxious 
to make sure of his model to raise any premature 
objections. "But you must please understand," was 
all he said, "that I am very much in earnest about 
this picture. If anybody but myself does see you, 
there must be no teasing and fooling." 

"Oh, I long for him to see me!" cried the girl. 
"I can just imagine his face, I can just imagine it!" 

The artist frowned. "This is not a joke, Gladys. 
Mind you, if I do let Clavering into our secret, it'll 
be only on condition that you promise not to flirt 
with him. I shall want you to stay very still, — just 
as I put you." 

Dangelis had never indicated before quite so plainly 
his blunt and unvarnished view of her relations with 
her spiritual adviser, and he now looked rather nerv- 
ously at her to see how she received this intimation. 

"I love teasing Mr. Clavering!" she cried savagely, 



216 WOOD AND STONE 

"I should like to tease him so much, that he never, 
never, would forget it!" 

This extreme expression of feeling was a surprise, 
and by no means a pleasant one, to Ralph Dangelis. 

"Why do you want so much to upset our friend?" 
he enquired. 

"I suppose," she answered, still instinctively play- 
ing up to his idea of her naivete and childishness, 
"it is because he thinks himself so good and so per- 
fectly safe from falling in love with anyone — and 
that annoys me." 

"Ha!" chuckled Dangelis, "so that's it, is it?" 
and he paced in thoughtful silence by her side until 
they reached the house. 

The morning that followed this conversation was 
as warm as the preceding ones, but a strong southern 
wind had risen, with a remote touch of the sea in its 
gusty violence. The trees in the park, as the artist 
and his girl-friend watched them from the terrace, 
while Mr. Romer, who had now returned from town 
worked in his study, and Lacrima helped Mrs. Romer 
to "do the flowers," swayed and rustled ominously in 
the eddying gusts. 

Clouds of dust kept blowing across the gates from 
the surface of the drive and the delphiniums bent 
low on their long stalks. The wind was of that pecu- 
liar character which, though hot and full of balmy 
scents, conveys a feeling of uneasiness and troubled 
expectation. It suggested thunder and with and be- 
yond that, something threatening, calamitous and 
fatal. 

Gladys was pre-occupied and gloomy that morn- 
ing. She was growing a little, just a little, tired of 



ART AND NATURE 217 

the American's conversation. Even the excitement 
of arranging about the purchase in Yeoborough of 
suitable materials for her Ariadne costume did not 
serve to lift the shadow from her brow. 

She was getting tired of her role as the naive, im- 
petuous and childish innocent; and though mentally 
still quite resolved upon following her mother's fre- 
quent and unblushing hints, and doing her best to 
"catch" this aesthetic master of a million dollars, the 
burden of the task was proving considerably irksome. 

Ralph's growing tendency to take her into his 
confidence in the matter of the philosophy of his 
art, she found peculiarly annoying. 

Philosophy of any kind was detestable to Gladys, 
and this particular sort of philosophy especially de- 
pressed her, by reducing the attraction of physical 
beauty to a kind of dispassionate analysis, against 
the chilling virtue of which all her amorous wiles 
hopelessly collapsed. It was becoming increasingly 
difficult, too, to secure her furtive interviews with 
Luke — interviews in which her cynical sensuality, 
suppressed in the society of the American, was allowed 
full swing. 

Her thoughts, at this very moment, turned passion- 
ately and vehemently towards the young stone-carver, 
who had achieved, at last, the enviable triumph of 
seriously ruffling and disturbing her egoistic self- 
reliance. 

Unused to suffering the least thwarting in what she 
desired, it fretted and chafed her intolerably to be 
forced to go on playing her coquettish part with this 
good-natured but inaccessible admirer, while all the 
time her soul yearned so desperately for the shame- 



218 WOOD. AND STONE 

less kisses that made her forget everything in the 
world but the ecstacy of passion. 

It was all very well to plan this posing as Ariadne 
and to listen to Dangelis discoursing on the beauty 
of pagan myths. The artist might talk endlessly 
about dryads and fauns. The faun she longed 
to be pursued by, this wind-swept morning, was now 
engaged in hammering Leonian stone, in her father's 
dusty work-shops. 

She knew, she told herself, far better than the 
cleverest citizen of Ohio, what a real Greek god was 
like, both in his kindness and his unkindness; and her 
nerves quivered with irritation, as the hot southern 
wind blew upon her, to think that she would only 
be able, and even then for a miserably few minutes, 
to steal off to her true Dionysus, after submitting 
for a whole long day to this aesthetic foolery. 

"It must have been a wind like this," remarked 
Dangelis, quite unobservant of his companion's mo- 
roseness, "which rocked the doomed palace of the blas- 
pheming Pentheus and drove him forth to his fate." 
He paused a moment, pondering, and then added, "I 
shall paint a picture of this, Gladys. I shall bring 
in Tiresias and the other old men, feeling the madness 
coming upon them." 

"I know all about that," the girl felt compelled to 
answer. 

"They danced, didn't they? They couldn't help 
dancing, though they were so old and weak?" 

Dangelis hardly required this encouragement, to 
launch into a long discourse upon the subject of 
Dionysian madness, its true symbolic meaning, its 
religious significance, its survival in modern times. 



ART AND NATURE 219 

He quite forgot, as he gave himself up to this 
interesting topic, his recent resolution to exclude dras- 
tically from his work all these more definitely intel- 
lectualized symbols. 

His companion's answers to this harangue became, 
by degrees, so obviously forced and perfunctory, that 
even the good-tempered Westerner found himself a 
little relieved when the appearance of Lacrima upon 
the scene gave him a different audience. 

When Lacrima appeared, Gladys slipped away and 
Dangelis was left to do what he could to overcome the 
Italian's habitual shyness. 

"One of these days," he said, looking with a kindly 
smile into the girl's frightened eyes, "I'm going to 
ask you, Miss Traffio, to take me to see your friend 
Mr. Quincunx." 

Lacrima started violently. This was the last name 
she expected to hear mentioned on the Nevilton 
terrace. 

"I — I — " she stammered, "I should be very 
glad to take you. I didn't know they had told you 

/bout him." 
"Oh, they only told me — you can guess the kind of 
thing! — that he's a queer fellow who lives by him- 
self in a cottage in Dead Man's Lane, and does 
nothing but dig in his garden and talk to old women 
over the wall. He's evidently one of these odd out- 
of-the-way characters, that your English — Oh, I beg 
your pardon! — your European villages produce. Mr. 
Clavering told me he is the only man in the place 
he never goes to see. Apparently he once insulted 
the good vicar." 

"He didn't insult him!" cried Lacrima with flashing 



220 WOOD AND STONE 

eyes. "He only asked him not to walk on his po- 
tatoes. Mr. Clavering is too touchy." 

"Well — anyway, do take me, sometime, to see 
this interesting person. Why shouldn't we go this 
afternoon? This wind seems to have driven all the 
ideas out of my head, as well as made your cousin 
extremely bad-tempered! So do take me to see your 
friend, Miss Traffio! We might go now — this 
moment — why not?" 

Lacrima shook her head, but she looked grateful 
and not displeased. As a matter of fact she was 
particularly anxious to introduce the American to 
Mr. Quincunx. In that vague subtle way which is 
a peculiarity, not only of the Pariah-type, but of 
human nature in general, she was anxious that 
Dangelis should be given at least a passing glimpse 
of another view of the Romer family from that which 
he seemed to have imbibed. 

It was not that she was definitely plotting against 
her cousin or trying to undermine her position with 
her artist-friend, but she felt a natural human desire 
that this sympathetic and good-tempered man should 
be put, to some extent at least, upon his guard. 

She was, at any rate, not at all unwilling to initiate 
him into the mysteries of Mr. Quincunx' mind, hoping, 
perhaps, in an obscure sort of way, that such an 
initiation would throw her own position, in this 
strange household, into a light more evocative of 
considerate interest. 

She had been so often made conscious of late that 
in his absorption in Gladys he had swept her brusquely 
aside as a dull and tiresome spoil-sport, that it was 
not without a certain feminine eagerness that she 



ART AND NATURE 221 

embraced the thought of his being compelled to 
listen to what she well knew Mr. Quincunx would 
have to say upon the matter. 

It was also an agreeable thought that in doing 
justice to the originality and depth of the recluse's 
intelligence, the American would be driven to recog- 
nize the essentially unintellectual tone of conversation 
at Nevilton House. 

She instinctively felt sure that the same generous 
and comprehensive sympathy that led him to con- 
done the vulgar lapses of these "new people," would 
lead him to embrace with more than toleration the 
eccentricities and aberration of the forlorn relative 
of the Lords of Glastonbury. 

With these thoughts passing rapidly through her 
brain, Lacrima found herself, after a little further 
hesitation, agreeing demurely to the American's pro- 
posal to visit the tenant of Dead Man's Lane before 
the end of the day. She left it uncertain at what 
precise hour they should go — probably between tea 
and dinner — because she was anxious, for her own 
sake, dreading her cousin's anger, to make the adven- 
ture synchronize, if possible, with the latter's assigna- 
tion with Luke, trusting that the good turn she thus did 
her, by removing her artistic admirer at a critical junc- 
ture, would propitiate the fair-haired tyrant's wrath. 

This matter having been satisfactorily settled, the 
Italian began to feel, as she observed the artist's bold 
and challenging glance embracing her from head to 
foot, while he continued to this new and more atten- 
tive listener his interrupted monologue, that species 
of shy and nervous restraint which invariably em- 
barrassed her when left alone in his society. 



222 WOOD AND STONE 

Inexperienced at detecting the difference between 
aesthetic interest and emotional interest, and asso- 
ciating the latter with nothing but what was brutal 
and gross, Lacrima experienced a disconcerting sort 
of shame when under the scrutiny of his eyes. 

Her timid comments upon his observations showed, 
however, so much more subtle insight into his mean- 
ing than Gladys had ever displayed, that it was with 
a genuine sense of regret that he accepted at last 
some trifling excuse she offered and let her wander 
away. Feeling restless and in need of distraction he 
returned to the house and sought the society of 
Mrs. Romer. 

He discovered this good lady seated in the house- 
keeper's room, perusing an illustrated paper and 
commenting upon its contents to the portly Mrs. 
Murphy. The latter discreetly withdrew on the 
appearance of the guest of the house, and Dangelis 
entered into conversation with his hostess. 

"Maurice Quincunx!" she cried, as soon as her 
visitor mentioned the recluse's queer name, "you 
don't mean to say that Lacrima's going to take you 
to see him? Well — of all the nonsensical ideas I 
ever heard! You'd better not tell Mortimer where 
you're going. He's just now very angry with 
Maurice. It won't please him at all, her taking you 
there. Maurice is related to me, you know, not to 
Mr. Romer. Mr. Romer has never liked him, and 
lately — but there! I needn't go into all that. 
We used to see quite a lot of him in the old days, 
when we first came to Nevilton. I like to have some- 
one about, you know, and Maurice was somebody 
to talk to, when Mr. Romer was away; but lately 



ART AND NATURE 223 

things have been quite different. It is all very sad and 
very tiresome, you know, but what can a person do?" 

This was the nearest approach to a hint of di- 
vergence between the master and mistress of Nevil- 
ton that Dangelis had ever been witness to, and even 
this may have been misleading, for the shrewd little 
eyes, out of which the lady peered at him, over her 
spectacles, were more expressive of mild malignity 
than of moral indignation. 

"But what kind of person is this Mr. Quincunx?" 
enquired the American. "I confess I can't, so far, 
get any clear vision of his personality. Won't you 
tell me something more definite about him, some- 
thing that will 'give me a line on him,' as we say 
in the States?" 

Mrs. Romer looked a trifle bewildered. It seemed 
that the personality of Mr. Quincunx was not a topic 
that excited her conversational powers. 

"I never really cared for him," she finally remarked. 
"He used to talk so unnaturally. He'd come over 
here, you know, almost every day — when Gladys 
was a little girl, — and talk and talk and talk. I 
used to think sometimes he wasn't quite right here," 
— the good lady tapped her forehead with her fore- 
finger, — "but in some things he was very sensible. 
I don't mean that he spoke loud or shouted or was 
noisy. Sometimes he didn't say very much; but 
even when he didn't speak, his listening was like 
talking. Gladys used to be quite fond of him when 
she was a little girl. He used to play hide-and-seek 
with her in the garden. I think he helped me to 
keep her out of mischief more than any of her gov- 
ernesses did. Once, you know, he beat Tom Raggles 



224 WOOD AND STONE 

— the miller's son — because he followed her across 
the park — beat him over the head, they say, with 
an iron pick. The lying wretch of a lad swore that 
she had encouraged him, and we were driven to hush 
the matter up, but I believe Mr. Quincunx had to 
see the inspector in Yeoborough." 

Beyond this somewhat obscure incident, Dangelis 
found it impossible to draw from Mrs. Romer any 
intelligible answer to his questions. The figure of 
the evasive tenant of the cottage in Dead Man's 
Lane remained as misty as ever. 

A little irritated by the ill success of his psycho- 
logical investigations, the artist, conscious that he 
was wasting the morning, began, out of sheer capri- 
cious wilfulness, to expound his aesthetic ideas to 
this third interlocutor. 

His nerves were in a morbid and unbalanced state, 
due partly to a lapse in his creative energy, and partly 
to the fact that in the depths of his mind he was 
engaged in a half-conscious struggle to suppress and 
keep in its proper place the insidious physical attrac- 
tion which Gladys had already begun to exert upon 
him. 

But the destiny of poor Dangelis, this inauspi- 
cious morning, was, it seemed, to become a bore and 
a pedant to everyone he encountered; for the lady 
had hardly listened for two minutes to his discourse 
when she also left him, with some suitable apology, 
and went off to perform more practical household 
duties. "What did this worthy Quincunx talk about, 
that you used to find so tiresome?" the artist flung 
after her, as she left the room. 

Mrs. Romer turned on the threshold. "He talked 



ART AND NATURE 225 

of nothing but the bible," she said. "The bible and 
our blessed Lord. You can't blame me, Mr. Dan- 
gelis, for objecting to that sort of thing, can you? 
I call it blasphemy, nothing short of blasphemy!" 

Dangelis wondered, as he strolled out again into 
the air, intending to seek solace for his irritable 
nerves in a solitary walk, whether, if it were blas- 
phemy in Nevilton House to refer to the Redeemer 
of men, and a nuisance and a bore to refer to heathen 
idolatries, what kind of topic it might be that the 
place's mental atmosphere demanded. 

He came to the conclusion, as he proceeded down 
the west drive, that the Romer family was more 
stimulating to watch, than edifying to converse with. 

After tea that evening, as Lacrima had hoped, 
Gladys announced her intention of going down to 
the mill to sketch. This — to Lacrima's initiated 
ears — meant an assignation with Luke, and she 
glanced quickly at Dangelis, with a shy smile, to 
indicate that their projected visit was possible. As 
soon as her cousin had departed they set out. Their 
expedition seemed likely to prove a complete success. 
They found Mr. Quincunx in one of his gayest moods. 
Had he been expecting the appearance of the Ameri- 
can he would probably have worked himself up into 
a miserable state of nervous apprehension; but the 
introduction thus suddenly thrust upon him, the 
genial simplicity of the Westerner's manners and his 
honest openness of speech disarmed him completely. 
In a mood of this kind the recluse became a charming 
companion. 

Dangelis was immensely delighted with him. His 
original remarks, and the quaint chuckling bursts of 



226 WOOD AND STONE 

sardonic laughter which accompanied his irresistible 
sallies, struck the artist as something completely 
different from what he had expected. He had 
looked to see a listless preoccupied mystic, ready to 
flood him with dreamy and wearisome monologues 
upon "the simple life," and in place of this he found 
an entertaining and gracious gentleman, full of de- 
licious malice, and uttering quip after quip of sly, 
half-innocent, half-subtle, Rabelaisean humour, in the 
most natural manner in the world. 

Not quite able to bring his affability to the point 
of inviting them into his kitchen, Mr. Quincunx car- 
ried out, into a sheltered corner, three rickety chairs 
and a small deal table. Here, protected from the 
gusty wind, he offered them cups of exquisitely pre- 
pared cocoa and little oatmeal biscuits. He asked 
the American question after question about his 
life in the remote continent, putting into his en- 
quiries such naive and childlike eagerness, that 
Dangelis congratulated himself upon having at last 
discovered an Englishman who was not superior to 
the charming vice of curiosity. Had the artist pos- 
sessed less of that large and careless aplomb which 
makes the utmost of every situation and never teases 
itself with criticism, he might have regarded the 
recluse's effusiveness as too deprecatory and pro- 
pitiatory in its tone. This, however, never occurred 
to him and he swallowed the solitary's flattery with 
joy and gratitude, especially as it followed so quickly 
upon the conversational deficiencies of Nevilton 
House. 

"I live in the mud here," said Mr. Quincunx, "and 
that makes it so excellent of you two people from 



ART AND NATURE 227 

the upper world to slip down into the mud with 
me." 

"I think you live very happily and very sensibly, 
Maurice!" cried Lacrima, looking with tender affec- 
tion upon her friend. "I wish we could all live as you 
do." 

The recluse waved his hand. "There must be 
lions and antelopes in the world," he said, "as well 
as frogs and toads. I expect this friend of yours, 
who has seen the great cities, is at this moment 
wishing he were in a cafe in New York or Paris, 
rather than sitting on a shaky chair drinking my bad 
cocoa." 

"That's not very complimentary to me, is it, Mr. 
Dangelis?" said Lacrima. 

"Mr. Quincunx is much to be envied," remarked 
the American. "He is living the sort of life that 
every man of sense would wish to live. It's out- 
rageous, the way we let ourselves become slave to 
objects and circumstances and people." 

Lacrima, anxious in the depths of her heart to 
give the American the benefit of Mr. Quincunx's 
insight into character, turned the conversation in 
the direction of the rumored political contest be- 
tween Romer and Wone. She was not quite pleased 
with the result of this manoeuvre, however, as it at 
once diminished the solitary's high spirits and led 
to his adoption of the familiar querulous tone of 
peevish carping. 

Mr. Quincunx spoke of his remoteness from the 
life around him. He referred with bitter sarcasm 
to the obsequious worship of power from which every 
inhabitant of the village of Nevilton suffered. 



228 WOOD AND STONE 

"I laugh," he said, "when our good socialist Wone 
gives vent to his eloquent protestations. Really, 
in his heart, he is liable to just the same cringing 
to power as all the rest. Let Romer make overtures 
to him, — only he despises him too much to do that, 
— and you'd soon see how quickly he'd swing round ! 
Give him a position of power, Dangelis — I expect 
you know from your experience in your own country 
how this works out, — and you would soon find him 
just as tyrannical, just as obdurate." 

"I think you're quite wrong, Maurice," cried 
Lacrima impetuously. "Mr. Wone is not an educated 
man as you are, but he's entirely sincere. You've 
only to listen to him to understand his sincerity." 

A grievous shadow of irritation and pique crossed 
the recluse's face. Nothing annoyed him more than 
this kind of direct opposition. He waved the objec- 
tion aside. Lacrima's outburst of honest feeling had 
already undone the subtle purpose with which she 
had brought the American. Her evasive Balaam 
was, it appeared, inclined, out of pure wilfulness, to 
bless rather than curse their grand enemy. 

"It's all injured vanity," Mr. Quincunx went on, 
throwing at his luckless girl-friend a look of quite 
disproportioned anger. "Its all his outraged power- 
instinct that drives him to take up this pose. I know 
what I'm talking about, for I often argue with him. 
Whenever I dispute the smallest point of his theories, 
he bursts out like a demon and despises me as a 
downright fool. He'd have got me turned out of 
the Social Meetings, because I contradicted him there, 
if our worthy clergyman hadn't intervened. You've 
no idea how deep this power-instinct goes. You must 



ART AND NATURE 229 

remember, Mr. Dangelis, you see a village like ours 
entirely from the outside and you think it beautiful, 
and the people charming and gentle. I tell you it's a 
nest of rattlesnakes! It's a narrow, poisonous cage, 
full of deadly vindictiveness and concentrated malice. 
Of course we know what human nature is, wherever 
you find it, but if you want to find it at its very worst, 
come to Nevilton!" 

"But you yourself," protested the artist, "are you 
not one of these same people? I understand that 
you — 

Mr. Quincunx rose to his feet, his expressive nostrils 
quivering with anger. "I don't allow anyone to say 
that of me!" he cried "I may have my faults, but I'm 
as different from all these rats, as a guillemot is differ- 
ent from a comorant!" 

He sat down again and his voice took almost a 
pleading tone. "You know I'm different. You must 
know I'm different! How could I see all these things 
as clearly as I do if it wasn't so? I've undergone 
what that German calls 'the Great Renunciation.' 
I've escaped the will to live. I neither care to acquire 
myself this accursed power — or to revolt, in jealous 
envy, against those who possess it." 

He relapsed into silence and contemplated his 
garden and its enclosing hedge, with a look of pro- 
found melancholy. Dangelis had been considerably 
distracted during the latter part of this discourse by 
his artistic interest in the delicate lines of Lacrima's 
figure and the wistful sadness of her expression. It 
was borne in upon him that he had somewhat neg- 
lected this shy cousin of his exuberant young friend. 
He promised himself to see more of the Italian, as 



230 WOOD AND STONE 

occasion served. Perhaps — if only Gladys would 
agree to it — he might make use of her, also, in his 
Dionysian impressions. 

"Surely," he remarked, speaking with the surface 
of his intelligence, and pondering all the while upon 
the secret of Lacrima's charm, "whatever this man 
may be, he's not a hypocrite, — is he? From all I 
hear he's pathetically in earnest." 

"Of course we know he's in earnest," answered 
Maurice. "What I maintain is, that it is his personal 
vindictiveness that creates his opinions. I believe 
he would derive genuine pleasure from seeing Nevil- 
ton House burnt to the ground, and every one of the 
people in it reduced to ashes!" 

"That proves his sincerity," answered the Ameri- 
can, keeping his gaze fixed so intently upon Lacrima 
that the girl began to be embarrassed. 

"He takes the view-point, no doubt, that if the 
present oligarchy in England were entirely destroyed, 
a new and happier epoch would begin at once." 

"I'm sure Mr. Wone is opposed to every kind of 
violence," threw in Lacrima. 

"Nonsense!" cried Mr. Quincunx abruptly. "He 
may not like violence because he's afraid of it react- 
ing on himself. But what he wants to do is to hu- 
miliate everyone above him, to disturb them, to 
prod them, to harass and distress them, and if 
possible to bring them down to his own level. He's 
got his thumb on Lacrima's friends over there," 
— he waved his hand in the direction of Nevil" 
ton House, — "because they happen to be at the 
top of the tree at this moment. But if you or I 
were there, it would be just the same. It's all 



ART AND NATURE 231 

jealousy. That's what it is, — jealousy and envy ! 
He wants to make every one who's prosperous and 
eats meat, and drinks champagne, know what it is 
to live a dog's life, as he has known it himself! I 
understand his feelings very well. We poor toads, who 
live in the mud, get extraordinary pleasure when any 
of you grand gentlemen slip by accident into our 
dirty pond. He sees such people enjoying themselves 
and being happy and he wants to stick a few pins 
into them!" 

"But why not, my good sir?" answered the Ameri- 
can. "Why shouldn't Wone use all his energy to 
crush Romer, just as Romer uses all his energy to 
crush Wone?" 

Lacrima sighed. "I don't think either of you make 
this world seem a very nice place," she observed. 

"A nice place?" cried Mr. Quincunx. "It's a 
place poisoned at the root — a place full of gall and 
wormwood!" 

"In my humble opinion," said the American, "it's 
a splendid world. I love to see these little struggles 
and contests going on. I love to see the delicious 
inconsistences and self-deceptions that we're all 
guilty of. I play the game myself, and I love to 
see others play it. Its the only thing I do love, 
except — " he added after a pause — "except my 
pictures." 

"I loathe the game," retorted the recluse, "and I 
find it impossible to live with people who do not 
loathe it too." 

"Well — all I can say, my friend," observed Dan- 
gelis, "is that this business of 'renouncing,' of which 
you talk, doesn't appeal to me. It strikes me as 



232 WOOD AND STONE 

a backing down and scurrying away, from the splen- 
did adventure of being alive at all. What are you 
alive for," he added, "if you are going to condemn 
the natural combatative instinct of men and women 
as evil and horrible? They are the instincts by 
which we live. They are the motives that propel the 
whole universe." 

"Mr. Wone would say," interposed Lacrima, "and 
I'm not sure that I don't agree with him, that the 
real secret of the universe is deeper than all these 
unhappy struggles. I don't like the unctuous way 
he puts these things, but he may be right all the 
same." 

"There's no secret of the universe, Miss Traffio," 
the American threw in. "There are many things 
we don't understand. But no one principle, — not 
even the principle of love itself, can be allowed to 
monopolize the whole field. Life, I always feel, is 
better interpreted by Art than by anything else, and 
Art is equally interested in every kind of energy." 

Lacrima's face clouded, and her hands fell wearily 
upon her lap. 

"Some sorts of energy," she observed, in a low 
voice, "are brutal and dreadful. If Art expresses that 
kind, I'm afraid I don't care for Art." 

The American gave her a quick, puzzled glance. 
There was a sorrowful intensity about her tone which 
he found difficult to understand. 

"What I meant was," he said, "that logically we 
can only do one of two things, — either join in the 
game and fight fiercely and craftily for our own hand, 
or take a convenient drop of poison and end the whole 
affair." 



ART AND NATURE 233 

The melancholy eyes of Mr. Quincunx opened very 
wide at this, and a fluttering smile twitched the cor- 
ners of his mouth. 

"We poor dogs," he said, "who are not wanted in 
this world, and don't believe in any other, are just 
the people who are most unwilling to finish ourselves 
off in the way you suggest. We can't help a sort of 
sneaking hope, that somehow or another, through 
no effort of our own, things will become better for 
us. The same cowardice that makes us draw back 
from life, makes us draw back from the thought of 
death. Can't you understand that, — you American 
citizen?" 

Dangelis looked from one to another of his com- 
panions. He could not help thinking in his heart of 
the gay animated crowds, who, at that very moment, 
in the streets of Toledo, Ohio, were pouring along 
the side-walks and flooding the picture shows. These 
quaint Europeans, for all their historic surroundings, 
were certainly lacking in the joy of life. 

"I can't conceive," remarked Mr. Quincunx sud- 
denly, and with that amazing candour which distin- 
guished him, "how a person as artistic and sensitive 
as you are, can stay with those people over there. 
Anyone can see that you're as different from them as 
light from darkness." 

"My dear sir," replied the American, interrupting 
a feeble little protest which Lacrima was beginning 
to make at the indiscretion of her friend, "I may or 
may not understand your wonder. The point is, 
that my whole principle of life is to deal boldly and 
freely with every kind of person. Can't you see that 
I like to look on at the spectacle of Mr. Romer's 



234 WOOD AND STONE 

energy and prosperity, just as I like to look on at 
the revolt against these things in the mind of our 
friend Wone. I tell you it tickles my fancy to touch 
this human pantomime on every possible side. The 
more unjust Romer is towards Wone, the more I 
am amused. And the more unjust Wone is towards 
Romer, the more I am amused. It is out of the 
clash of these opposite injustices that nature, — how 
shall I put it? — that nature expands and grows." 

Mr. Quincunx gazed at the utterer of these anti- 
nomian sentiments, with humorous interest. Dangelis 
gathered, from the twitching of his heavy mous- 
tache, that he was chuckling like a goblin. The 
queer fellow had a way of emerging out of his mel- 
ancholy, at certain moments, like a badger out of his 
hole; and at such times he would bring the most ideal 
or speculative conversation down with a jerk to the 
very bed-rock of reality. 

"What's amusing you so?" enquired the citizen 
of Ohio. 

"I was only thinking," chuckled Mr. Quincunx, 
stroking his beard, and glancing sardonically at 
Lacrima, "that the real reason of your enjoying 
yourself at Nevilton House, is quite a different one 
from any you have mentioned." 

Dangelis was for the moment quite confused. "Con- 
found the fellow!" he muttered to himself, "I'm 
curst if I'm sorry he's under the thumb of our friend 
Romer!" 

His equanimity was soon restored, however, and he 
covered his confusion by assuming a light and flip- 
pant air. 

"Ha! ha!" he exclaimed, "so you're thinking I've 



ART AND NATURE 235 

been caught by this young lady's cousin? Well! 
I don't mind confessing that we get on beautifully 
together. But as for anything else, I think Miss 
Traffio will bear witness that I am quite as devoted 
to the mother as the daughter. But Gladys Romer 
must be admitted a very attractive girl, — mustn't she 
Miss Traffio? I suppose our friend here is not so 
stern an ascetic as to refuse an artist like me the 
pleasure of admiring such adorable suppleness as 
your cousin possesses; such a — such a — " he waved 
his hand vaguely in the air, "such a free and flexible 
sort of grace?" 

Mr. Quincunx picked up a rough ash stick which 
lay on the ground and prodded the earth. His face 
showed signs of growing once more convulsed with 
indecent merriment. 

"Why do you use all those long words?" he said. 
"We country dogs go more straight to the point in 
these matters. Flexible grace! Can't you confess 
that you're bitten by the old Satan, which we all 
have in us? Adorable suppleness! Why can't you 
say a buxom wench, a roguish wench, a playful 
wanton wench? We country fellows don't under- 
stand your subtle artistic expressions. But we know 
what it is when an honest foreigner like yourself 
goes walking and talking with a person like Madame 
Gladys!" 

Glancing apprehensively at the American's face 
Lacrima saw that her friend's rudeness had made 
him, this time, seriously angry. 

She rose from her chair. "We must be getting 
back," she said, "or we shall be late. I hope you and 
Mr. Dangelis will know more of one another, before 



236 WOOD AND STONE 

he has to leave Nevilton. I'm sure you'll find that 
you've quite a lot in common, when you really 
begin to understand each other." 

The gravity and earnestness with which she uttered 
these words made both her companions feel a little 
ashamed. 

"After all," thought the artist, "he is a typical 
Englishman." 

"After all," thought Mr. Quincunx, "I've always 
been told that Americans treat women as if they were 
made of tissue-paper." 

Their parting from the recluse at his garden gate 
was friendly and natural. Mr. Quincunx reverted 
to his politest manner, and the artist's good temper 
seemed quite restored. 

In retrospect, after the passing of a couple of days, 
spent by Dangelis in preparing the accessories of his 
Ariadne picture, and by Gladys in unpacking certain 
mysterious parcels telegraphed for to London, the 
American found himself recalling his visit to Dead 
Man's Cottage with none but amiable feelings. The 
third morning which followed this visit, dawned 
upon Nevilton with peculiar propitiousness. The 
air was windless and full of delicious fragrance. The 
bright clear sunshine seemed to penetrate every por- 
tion of the spacious Elizabethan mansion and to 
turn its corridors and halls, filled with freshly plucked 
flowers, into a sort of colossal garden house. 

Dangelis rose that morning with a more than 
normal desire to plunge into his work. He was con- 
siderably annoyed, however, to find that Gladys had 
actually arranged to have Mr. Clavering invited to 
lunch and had gone so far as to add a pencilled scrawl 



ART AND NATURE 237 

of her own — she herself laughingly confessed as 
much — to her mother's formal note, begging him to 
appear in the middle of the forenoon, as she had a 
"surprise" in store for him. 

The American's anxiety to begin work as soon as 
possible with his attractive model, made him suffer 
miseries of impatience, while Gladys amused herself 
with her Ariadne draperies, making Lacrima dress 
and undress her twenty times, behind the screens of 
the studio. 

She appeared at last, however, and the artist, 
looking up at her from his canvas, was for the 
moment staggered by her beauty. The instinctive 
taste of her cousin's Latin fingers was shown in the 
exquisite skill with which the classical folds of the 
dress she wore accentuated the natural charm of her 
young form. 

The stuff of which her chief garment was made 
was of a deep gentian blue and the contrast between 
this color and the dazzling whiteness of her neck and 
arms was enough to ravish not only the aesthetic 
soul in the man but his more human senses also. 
Her bare feet were encased in white sandals, bound 
by slender leathern straps, which were twisted round 
her legs almost as high as the knee. A thin metal 
band, of burnished bronze, was clasped about her 
head and over and under this, her magnificent sun- 
coloured hair flowed, in easy and natural waves, to 
where it was caught up, in a Grecian knot, above the 
nape^fMaer neck. Save for this band round her head 
she wore no clasps or jewelry of any kind, and the 
softness of her flesh was made more emphatic by 
the somewhat rough and coarse texture of her loosely 



238 WOOD AND STONE 

folded drapery. Dangelis was so lost in admiration 
of this delicious apparition, that he hardly noticed 
Lacrima's timid farewell, as the Italian slipped away 
into the garden and left them together. It was in- 
deed not till Gladys had descended from the little 
wooden platform and coyly approached the side of his 
easel, that the artist recovered himself. 

"Upon my soul, but you look perfectly wonderful!" 
he cried enthusiastically. "Quick! Let's to business. 
I want to get well started, before we have any inter- 
ruption." 

He led her back to the platform, and made her 
lean in a semi-recumbent position upon a cushioned 
bench which he had prepared for the purpose. He 
took a long time to satisfy himself as to her precise 
pose, but at last, with a lucky flash of inspiration, 
and not without assistance from Gladys herself, whose 
want of aesthetic feeling was compensated for in 
this case by the profoundest of all feminine instincts, 
he found for her the inevitable, the supremely effec- 
tive, position. It was with a thrill of exquisite sweet- 
ness, pervading both soul and senses, that he began 
painting her. He felt as though this were one of the 
few flawless and unalloyed moments of his life. 
Everything in him and about him seemed to vibrate 
and quiver in response to the breath of beauty and 
youth. Penetrated by the delicate glow of a passion 
which was free, at present, from the sting of sensual 
craving, he felt as though all the accumulative im- 
pressions, of a long procession of harmonious days, 
were summed up and focussed in this fortunate hour. 
The loveliness of the young girl, as he transferred it, 
curve by curve, shadow by shadow, to his canvas, 



ART AND NATURE 239 

seemed expressive of a reserved secret of enchant- 
ment, until this moment withheld and concealed from 
him. The ravishing contours of her lithe figure seemed 
to open up, to his magnetized imagination, vistas 
and corridors of emotion, such as he had never even 
dreamed of experiencing. She was more than a 
supremely lovely girl. She was the very epitome and 
incarnation of all those sunward striving forces and 
impulses, which, rising from the creative heart of the 
universe, struggle upwards through the resisting 
darkness. She was a Sun-child, a creature of air and 
earth and fire, a daughter of Circe and Dionysus; and 
as he drained the so frankly offered philtre of her 
intoxicating beauty, and flung his whole soul's re- 
sponse to it in glowing color upon the canvas, he 
felt that he would never again thus catch the fates 
asleep, or thus plunge his hands into the nectar of 
the supreme gods. 

The world presented itself to him at that moment, 
while he swept his brush with fierce passionate energy 
across the canvas, as bathed in translucent and un- 
clouded ether. Everything it contained, of weakness 
and decadence, of gloom and misgiving, seemed to be 
transfigured, illuminated, swallowed up. He felt as 
though, in thus touching the very secret of divine 
joy, held in the lap of the abysmal mothers, nothing 
but energy and beauty and creative force would 
ever concern or occupy him again. All else, — all 
scruples, all questions, all problems, all renunciations 
— seemed but irrelevant and negligible vapour, com- 
pared with this glorious and sun-lit stream of life. 
He worked on feverishly at his task. By degrees, 
and in so incredibly a short time that Gladys herself 



240 WOOD AND STONE 

was astonished when he told her she could rest and 
stretch herself a little, the figure of the Ariadne he 
had seen in his imagination limned itself against the 
expectant background. He was preparing to resume 
his labour, and Gladys, after a boyish scramble into 
the neighbouring conservatory, and an eager return 
to the artist's side with a handful of early strawber- 
ries, was just re-mounting the platform, when the door 
of the studio opened and Hugh Clavering entered. 

He had been almost inclined, — in so morbid a 
condition were his nerves — to knock at the door be- 
fore coming in, but a lucky after-thought had re- 
minded him that such an action would have been 
scandalously inappropriate. 

Assuming an air of boyish familiarity, which har- 
monized better perhaps with her leather-bound ankles 
than with her girlish figure, Gladys jumped down at 
once from the little stage and ran gaily to welcome him. 
She held out her hand, and then, raising both her arms 
to her head and smoothing back her bright hair beneath 
its circlet of bronze, she inquired of him, in a soft low 
murmur, whether he thought she looked "nice." 

Clavering was struck dumb. He had all those 
shivering sensations of trembling agitation which are 
described with such realistic emphasis in the frag- 
mentary poem of Sappho. The playful girl, her fair 
cheeks flushed with excitement and a treacherous 
light in her blue eyes, swung herself upon the rough 
oak table that stood in the middle of the room, and 
sat there, smiling coyly at him, dangling her sandalled 
feet. She still held in her hand the strawberries she 
had picked; and as, with childish gusto, she put one 
after another of these between her lips, she looked at 



ART AND NATURE 241 

him with an indescribable air of mischievous, challeng- 
ing defiance. 

"So this is the pagan thing," thought the poor 
priest, "that it is my duty to initiate into the re- 
ligion of sacrifice!" 

He could not prevent the passing through his brain 
of a grotesque and fantastic vision in which he saw 
himself, like a second hermit of the Thebaid, leading 
this equivocal modern Thais to the waters of Jordan. 
Certainly the association of such a mocking white- 
armed darling of errant gods with the ceremony of 
confirmation was an image somewhat difficult to em- 
brace! The impatient artist, apologizing profusely to 
the embarrassed visitor, soon dragged off his model 
to her couch on the platform, and it fell to the lot of 
the infatuated priest to subside in paralyzed helpless- 
ness, on a modest seat at the back of the room. 
What thoughts, what wild unpermitted thoughts, 
chased one another in strange procession through his 
soul, as he stared at the beautiful heathen figure thus 
presented to his gaze! 

The movements of the artist, the heavy stream of 
sunlight falling aslant the room, the sweet exotic 
smells borne in from the window opening on the con- 
servatory, seemed all to float and waver about him, 
as though they were things felt by a deep-sea diver 
beneath a weight of humming waters. He gave him- 
self up completely to what that moment brought. 

Faith, piety, sacrifice, devotion, became for him 
mere words and phrases — broken, fragmentary, un- 
meaning — sounds heard in the shadow-land of sleep, 
vague and indistinct like the murmur of drowned 
bells under a brimming tide. 



242 WOOD AND STONE 

It may well be believed that the langourously 
reclining model was not in the least oblivious to the 
effect she produced. This was, indeed, one of Gladys' 
supreme moments, and she let no single drop of its 
honeyed distillation pass undrained. She permitted 
her heavy-lidded blue eyes, suffused with a soft 
dreamy mist, to rest tenderly on her impassioned 
lover; and as if in response to the desperate longing 
in his look, a light-fluttering, half-wistful smile crossed 
her parted lips, like a ripple upon a shadowy stream. 

The girl's vivid consciousness of the ecstasy of 
power was indeed, in spite of her apparent lethargic 
passivity, never more insanely aroused. Lurking 
beneath the dreamy sweetness of the look with 
which she responded to Clavering's magnetized gaze, 
were furtive depths of Circean remorselessness. Under 
her gentian-blue robe her youthful breast trembled 
with exultant pleasure, and she felt as though, with 
every delicious breath she drew, she were drinking to 
the dregs the very wine of the immortals. 

"I must give Mr. Clavering some strawberries!" she 
suddenly cried, jumping to her feet, and breaking 
both the emotional and the aesthetic spell as if they 
were gossamer-threads. "He looks bored and tired." 

In vain the disconcerted artist uttered an imploring 
groan of dismay, as thus, at the critical moment, his 
model betrayed him. In vain the bewildered priest 
professed his complete innocence of any wish for 
strawberries. 

The wayward girl clambered once more through 
the conservatory window, at the risk of spoiling 
her Olympian attire, and returning with a hand- 
ful of fruit, tripped coquettishly up to both of 



ART AND NATURE 243 

them in turn and insisted on their dividing the 
spoil. 

Had either of the two men been in a mood for 
classical reminiscences, the famous image of Circe 
feeding her transformed lovers might have been irre- 
sistibly evoked. They were all three thus occupied, — 
the girl in the highest spirits, and both men feeling 
a little sulky and embarrassed, when, to the general 
consternation, the door began slowly to open, and 
a withered female figure, clad in a ragged shawl and 
a still more dilapidated skirt made its entry into the 
room. 

"Why, it's Witch-Bessie!" cried Gladys, involun- 
tarily clutching at Clavering's arm. "Wicked old 
thing! She gave me quite a start. Well, Bessie, 
what do you want here? Don't you know the way 
to the back door? You mustn't come round to the 
front like this. What do you want?" 

Each of the model's companions made a charac- 
teristic movement. Dangelis began feeling in his 
pocket for some suitable coin, and Clavering raised 
his hand with an half-reproachful, half-conciliatory, 
and altogether pastoral gesture, as if at the same 
time threatening and welcoming a lost sheep of his 
flock. 

But Witch-Bessie had only eyes for Gladys. She 
stared in petrified amazement at the gentian-blue 
robe and the boyish sandals. 

"Send her away!" whispered the girl to Mr. 
Clavering. "Tell her to go to the back door. They'll 
give her food and things there." 

The cadaverous stare of the old woman relaxed 
at last. Fixing her colourless eyes on the two men, 



244 WOOD AND STONE 

and pointing at Gladys with her skinny hand, she 
cried, in a shrill, querulous voice, that rang unpleas- 
antly through the studio, "What be she then, touzled 
up in like of this? What be she then, with her 
Jezebel face and her shameless looks? Round to 
back door, is it, 'ee 'd have me sent? I do know 
who you be, well enough, Master Clavering, and I 
do guess this gentleman be him as they say does 
bide here; but what be she, tricketed up in them out- 
landish clothes, like a Gypoo from Roger-town 
Fair? Be she Miss Gladys Romer, or baint she?" 

"Come, Bessie," said Clavering in propitiatory 
tone. "Do as the young lady says and go round to 
the back. I'll go with you if you like. I expect 
they'll have plenty of scraps for you in that big 
kitchen." 

He laid his hand on the old woman's shoulder and 
tried to usher her out. But she turned on him 
angrily. "Scraps!" she cried. "Scraps thee own self ! 
What does the like of a pair of gentlemen such as 
ye be, Sitter-mousing and flandering round, with a 
hussy like she?" 

She turned furiously upon Gladys, waving aside 
with a snort of contempt the silver coin which 
Dangelis, with a vague notion that "typical English 
beggars " should be cajoled with gifts, sought to press 
into her hand. 

\ "'Twas to speak a bit of my mind to 'ee, not to 
beg at your blarsted back door that I did come this 
fine morning! Us that do travel by night and by 
day hears precious strange things sometimes. What 
for, my fine lady, did ye go and swear to policeman 
Frank, down in Nevilton, that 'twas I took your God- 



ART AND NATURE 245 

darned pigeons? Your dad may be a swinking magis- 
trate, what can send poor folks to gaol for snaring 
rabbities, or putting a partridge in the pot to make 
the cabbage tasty, but what right does that give a 
hussy like thee to send policeman Frank swearing 
he'll lock up old Bessie? It don't suit wi' I, this 
kind of flummery; so I do tell 'ee plain and straight. 
It don't suit wi' I!" 

"Come, clear out of this, my good woman!" cried 
the indignant clergyman, seizing the trembling old 
creature by the arm. 

"Don't hurt her! Don't hurt her!" exclaimed 
Gladys. "She'll put the evil eye on me. She did 
it to Nance Purvis and she's been mad ever since." 

"It's a lie!" whimpered the old woman, struggling 
feebly as Clavering pulled her towards the door. 

"It's your own dad and Nance's dad with their 
ugly ways what have driven that poor lass moon- 
crazy. Mark Purvis do whip her with withy sticks — 
all the country knows it. Darn 'ee, for a black devil's 
spawn, and no blessed minister, pulling and harrying 
an old woman!" 

This last ejaculation was addressed to the furious 
Mr. Clavering, who was now thrusting her by bodily 
force through the open door. With one final effort 
Witch-Bessie broke loose from him and turned on 
the threshold. "Ye shall have the evil eye, since 
ye've called for it," she shrieked, making a wild 
gesture in the air, in the direction of the shrinking 
Ariadne. "And what if I let these two gentlemen 
know with whom it was ye were out walking the other 
night? I did see 'ee, and I do know what I did see! 
I'm a pigeon-stealer am I, ye flaunting flandering 



246 WOOD AND STONE 

Gypoo? Let me tell these dear gentlemen how as — " 
Her voice died suddenly away in an incoherent 
splutter, as the vicar of Nevilton, with his hand 
upon her mouth, swung her out of the door. 

Gladys sank down upon a chair pale and trembling. 

As soon, however, as the old woman's departure 
seemed final, she began to recover her equanimity. 
She gave vent to a rather forced and uneasy laugh. 
"Silly old thing!" she exclaimed. "This comes of 
mother's getting rid of the dogs. She never used to 
come here when we had the dogs. They scented her 
out in a minute. I wish we had them now to let loose 
at her! They'd make her skip." 

"I do hope, my dear child," said Dangelis 
anxiously, "that she has not really frightened you? 
What a terrible old creature! I've always longed to 
see a typical English witch, but bless my heart if I 
want to see another!" 

"She's gone now," announced Mr. Clavering, return- 
ing hot and breathless. "I saw her half-way down 
the drive. She'll be out of sight directly. I expect 
you don't want to see any more of her, else, if you 
come out here a step or two, you can see her slink- 
ing away." 

Gladys thanked him warmly for his energetic de- 
fence of her, but denied having the least wish to 
witness her enemy's retreat. 

"It must be getting near lunch time," she said. 
"If you don't mind waiting a moment, I'll change 
my dress." And she tripped off behind the screens. 



CHAPTER XII 

AUBER LAKE 

THE presence of Ralph Dangelis in Nevilton 
House had altered, in more than one respect, 
the relations between Gladys and her cousin. 

The girls saw much less of each other, and Lacrima 
was left comparatively at liberty to follow her own 
devices. 

On several occasions, however, when they were all 
three together, it chanced that the American had 
made himself extremely agreeable to the younger 
girl, even going so far as to take her part, quite ener- 
getically, in certain lively discussions. These occa- 
sions were not forgotten by Gladys, and she hated 
the Italian with a hatred more deep-rooted than 
ever. 

As soon as her first interest in the American's 
society began to pall a little, she cast about in her 
mind for some further way of causing discomfort and 
agitation to the object of her hatred. 

Only those who have taken the trouble to watch 
carefully what might be called the "magnetic antag- 
onism," between feminine animals condemned to live 
in close relations with one another, will understand the 
full intensity of what this young person felt. It was 
not necessarily a sign of any abnormal morbidity in 
our fair-haired friend. 

For a man in whom one is interested, even though 



248 WOOD AND STONE 

such interest be mild and casual, to show a definite 
tendency to take sides against one, on behalf of one's 
friend, is a sufficient justification, — at least so nature 
seems to indicate — for the awakening in one's heart 
of an intense desire for revenge. Such desire is often 
aroused in the most well-constituted temperaments 
among us, and in this case it might be said that the 
sound physical nerves of the daughter of the Romers 
craved the satisfaction of such an impulse with the 
same stolid persistence as her flesh and blood craved 
for air and sun. But how to achieve it? What new 
and elaborate humiliation to devise for this irritating 
partner of her days? 

The bathing episode was beginning to lose its 
piquancy. Custom, with its kindly obliviousness, had 
already considerably modified Lacrima's fears, and 
there had ceased to be for Gladys any further pleas- 
ure in displaying her aquarian agility before a com- 
panion so occupied with the beauty of lawn and 
garden at that magical hour. 

Fate, however, partial, as it often is, to such 
patient tenacity of emotion, let fall at last, at her 
very feet, the opportunity she craved. 

She had just begun to experience that miserable 
sensation, so sickeningly oppressive to a happy dis- 
position, of hating where she could not hurt, when, 
one evening, news was brought to the house by 
Mark Purvis the game-keeper that a wandering flock 
of wild-geese had taken up its temporary abode amid 
the reeds of Auber Lake. Mr. Romer himself 
soon brought confirmation of this fact. 

The birds appeared to leave the place during the 
day and fly far westward, possibly as far as the 



AUBER LAKE 249 

marshes of Sedgemoor, but they always returned at 
night-fall to this new tarrying ground. 

The very evening of this exciting discovery, Gladys' 
active mind formulated a thrilling and absorbing 
project, which she positively trembled with longing 
to communicate to Lacrima. She found the long 
dinner that night, and the subsequent chatter with 
Dangelis on the terrace, almost too tedious to be 
endured; and it was at an unusually early hour 
that she surprised her cousin by joining her in her 
room. 

The Pariah was seated at her mirror, wearily re- 
ducing to order her entangled curls, when Gladys 
entered. She looked very fragile in her white bodice 
and the little uplifted arms, that the mirror reflected, 
showed unnaturally long and thin. When one hates 
a person with the sort of massive hatred such as, 
at that time, beat sullenly under Gladys' rounded 
bosom, every little physical characteristic in the object 
of our emotion is an added incentive to our revenge- 
ful purpose. 

This Saturnian planetary law is unfortunately not 
confined to antipathies between persons of the same 
sex. Sometimes the most unhappy results have been 
known to spring from the manner in which one or 
another, even of two lovers, has lifted chin or head, 
or moved characteristically across a room. 

Thus it were almost impossible to exaggerate 
the loathing with which this high-spirited girl con- 
templated the pale oval face and slender swaying 
arms of her friend, as full of her new project she 
flung herself into her favourite arm chair and met 
Lacrima's frightened eyes in the gilded Georgian 



250 WOOD AND STONE 

mirror. She began her attack with elaborate feline 
obliquity. 

"They say Mark Purvis' crazy daughter has been 
giving trouble again. He was up this morning, talk- 
ing to father about it." 

"Why don't you send her away?" said the Italian, 
without turning round. 

"Send her away? She has to do all the house-work 
down there! Mark has no one else, you know, and 
the poor man does not want the expense of hiring 
a woman." 

"Isn't it rather a lonely place for a child like that?" 

"Lonely? I should think it is lonely! But what 
would you have? Somebody must keep that cottage 
clean; and its just as well a wretched mad girl, of 
no use to anyone, should do it, as that a sound person 
should lose her wits in such a god-forsaken spot!" 

"What does she do at — at these times? Is she 
violent?" 

" Oh, she gets out in the night and roams about the 
woods. She was once found up to her knees in the 
water. No, she isn't exactly violent. But she is a 
great nuisance." 

"It must be terrible for her father!" 

"Well — in a way it does bother him. But he is 
not the man to stand much nonsense." 

"I hope he is kind to her." 

Gladys laughed. "What a soft-hearted darling 
you are! I expect he finds sometimes that you 
can't manage mad people, any more than you can 
manage children, without using the stick. But I 
fancy, on the whole, he doesn't treat her badly. He's 
a fairly good-natured man." 



AUBER LAKE 251 

The Pariah sighed. "I think Mr. Romer ought to 
send her away at once to some kind of home, and 
pay someone to take her place." 

"I daresay you do! If you had your way, father 
wouldn't have a penny left in the bank." 

The Pariah rose from her seat, crossed over to the 
window, and looked out into the sultry night. What 
a world this was! All the gentle and troubled 
beings in it seemed over-ridden by gigantic merciless 
wheels ! 

A little awed, in spite of herself, by the solemnity 
of her companion, Gladys sought to bring her back 
out of this translunar mood by capricious playfulness. 
She stretched herself out at full length in her low chair, 
and calling the girl to her side, began caressing her, 
pulling her down at last upon her lap. 

"Guess what has happened!" she murmured 
softly, as the quick beating of the Pariah's heart 
communicated itself to her, and made her own still 
harder. 

"Oh, I know its something I shan't like, something 
that I shall dread!" cried the younger girl, making 
a feeble effort to escape. 

"Shall I tell you what it is?" Gladys went on, 
easily overcoming this slight movement. "You know, 
don't you, that there's a flock of wild-geese settled on 
the island in the middle of Auber Lake? Well! I 
have got a lovely plan. I've never yet seen those 
birds, because they don't come back till the evening. 
What you and I are going to do, darling, is to slip 
away out of the house, next time Mr. Dangelis goes 
to see that friend of yours, and make straight to 
Auber Lake! I've never been into those woods by 



252 WOOD AND STONE 

night, and it'll be extraordinarily thrilling to see 
what Auber Lake looks like with the moon gleaming 
on it. And then we may be able to make the wild- 
geese rise, by throwing sticks or something, into the 
water. Oh, it'll be simply lovely! Don't you think 
so, darling? Aren't you quite thrilled by the idea?" 

The Pariah liberated herself by a sudden effort 
and stood erect on the floor. 

"I think you are the wickedest girl that God ever 
made!" she said solemnly. And then, as the full 
implication of the proposed adventure grew upon her, 
she clasped her hands convulsively. "You cannot 
mean it!" she cried. "You cannot mean it! You 
are teasing me, Gladys. You are only saying it to 
tease me." 

"Why, you're not such a coward as all that!" 
her cousin replied. "Think what it must be for 
Nance Purvis, who always lives down there! I 
shouldn't like to be more cowardly than a poor crazy 
labouring girl. We really ought to visit the place, 
once in a way, to see if these stories are true about 
her escaping out of the house. One can never tell 
from what Mark says. He may have been drinking 
and imagining it all." 

Lacrima turned away and began rapidly undressing. 
Without a word she arranged the books on her table, 
moving about like a person in a trance, and without 
a word she slipped into bed and turned her face to 
the wall. 

Gladys smiled, stretched herself luxuriously, and con- 
tinued speaking. 

"Auber Lake by moon-light would well be worth 
a night walk. You know it's supposed to be the 



AUBER LAKE 253 

most romantic spot in Somersetshire? They say it's 
incredibly old. Some people think it was used in 
prehistoric times by the druids as a place of worship. 
The villagers never dare to go near it after dark. 
They say that very curious noises are heard there. 
But of course that may only be the mad — " 

She was not allowed to go on. The silent figure 
in the bed suddenly sat straight up, with wide-staring 
eyes fixed upon her, and said slowly and solemnly, 
"If I come with you to this place, will you faithfully 
promise me that your father will send that girl into 
a home?" 

Gladys was so surprised by this unexpected utter- 
ance that she made an inarticulate gasping noise in 
her throat. 

"Yes," she answered, mesmerized by the Pariah's 
fixed glance. "Yes — most certainly. If you come 
with me to see those wild-geese, I'll make any 
promise you like about that girl!" 

Lacrima continued for a moment fixing her with wide- 
dilated pupils. 

Then, with a shiver that passed from head to foot, 
she slowly sank back on her pillows and closed her 
eyes. 

Gladys rose a little uneasily from her chair. "But 
of course," she said, "you understand she may not 
want to go away. She is quite crazy, you know. And 
she may prefer wandering about freely among dark 
woods to being locked up in a nice white-washed 
asylum, under the care of fat motherly nurses!" 

With this parting shot she went off into her own 
room feeling in a curious vague manner that some- 
how or another the edge of her delectation had been 



254 WOOD AND STONE 

taken off. In this unexpected resolution of the 
Italian, the Mythology of Sacrifice had suddenly 
struck a staggering blow at the Mythology of Power. 
Like the point of a bright silver sword, this unforseen 
vein of heroism in the Pariah cleared the sultry air 
of that hot night with a magical freshness and 
coolness. A planetary onlooker might have been 
conscious at that moment of strange spiritual vibra- 
tions passing to and fro over the sleeping roofs of 
Nevilton. But perhaps such a one would also have 
been conscious of the abysmal indifference to either 
stream of opposing influence, of the high, cold galaxy 
of the Milky Way, stretched contemptuously above 
them all! 

All we are able to be certain of is, that as the fair- 
haired daughter of the house prepared for bed she 
muttered sullenly to herself. "I'll make her go any- 
way. It will be lovely to feel her shiver, when we 
pass under those thick laurels! That mad girl won't 
leave the place, unless they drag her by force." 

Left alone, Lacrima remained, for nearly two hours, 
motionless and with closed eyes. She was not asleep, 
however. Strange and desperate thoughts pursued 
one another through her brain. She wondered if she, 
too, like the girl of Auber Lake, were destined to 
find relief from this merciless world in the unhinging 
of her reason. She reverted again and again in her 
mind to her cousin's final malicious suggestion. 
That would be indeed, she thought, a bitter example 
of life's irony, if after going through all this to save 
the poor wretch, such sacrifice only meant worse 
misery for her. But no! God could not be as unkind 
as that. 



AUBER LAKE 255 

She stretched out her arm for a book with which 
to still the troublesome palpitation of her heart. 

The book she seized by chance turned out to be 
Andersen's Fairy Stories, and she read herself to 
sleep with the tale of the little princess who wove 
coats of nettles for her enchanted brothers, and all 
night long she dreamed of mad unhappy girls strug- 
gling amid entwining branches, of bottomless lakes full 
of terrible drowned faces, and of flocks of wild-geese 
that were all of them kings' sons! 

The Saturday following this eventful colloquy be- 
tween the cousins was a day of concentrated gloom. 
There was thunder in the vicinity and, although no 
rain had actually fallen in Nevilton, there was a 
brooding presence of it in the heavy atmosphere. 

The night seemed to descend that evening more 
quickly than usual. By eight o'clock a strange 
unnatural twilight spread itself over the landscape. 
The trees in the park submitted forlornly to a burden 
of sultry indistinction and seemed, in their pregnant 
stillness, to be trying in vain to make mysterious 
signals to one another. 

Dinner in the gracious Elizabethan dining-room 
was an oppressive and discomfortable meal to all 
concerned. Mrs. Romer was full of tremours and 
apprehensions over the idea of a possible thunder- 
storm. 

The quarry-owner was silent and preoccupied, his 
mind reviewing all the complicated issues of a new 
financial scheme. Dangelis kept looking at his 
watch. He had promised to be at Dead Man's Lane 
by nine o'clock, and the meal seemed to drag itself 
out longer than he had anticipated. 



256 WOOD AND STONE 

He was a little apprehensive, too, as to what 
reception he would receive when he did arrive at 
Mr. Quincunx's threshold. 

Their last encounter had been so extremely con- 
troversial, that he feared lest the sensitive recluse 
might be harbouring one of his obstinate psychic 
reactions at his expense. 

He was very unwilling to risk the loss of Mr. 
Quincunx's society. There was no one in Nevilton 
to whom he could discourse quite as freely and 
philosophically as he could to the conscripted office- 
clerk, and his American interest in a "representative 
type" found inexhaustible satisfaction in listening to 
the cynical murmurings of this eccentric being. 

Lacrima was calm and self-contained, but she ate 
hardly anything; and the hand with which she 
raised her glass to her lips trembled in spite of all 
her efforts. 

Gladys herself was exuberant with suppressed 
excitement. Every now and then she glanced fur- 
tively at the window, and at other times, when there 
was no reason for such an outburst, she gave vent to 
a low feline laugh. She was of the type of animal that 
the approach of thunder, and the presence of electric- 
ity in the air, fills with magnetic nervous exaltation. 

The meal was over at last, and the various persons 
of the group hastened to separate, each of them 
weighed upon, as if by an atmospheric hand, with 
the burden of their own purposes and apprehensions. 

The two girls retired to their rooms. Mrs. Romer 
retreated to her favourite corner in the entrance hall, 
and then, uneasy even here, took refuge in the as- 
suaging society of her friend the housekeeper. 



AUBER LAKE 257 

Romer himself marched away gloomily to his 
study; and Dangelis, snatching up his coat and hat, 
made off across the south garden. 

It did not take the American long to reach the 
low hedge which separated Mr. Quincunx's garden 
from the lane. The recluse was awaiting him, and 
joined him at once at the gate, giving him no invita- 
tion to enter, and taking for granted that their con- 
versation was to be a pedestrian one. 

Mr. Quincunx experienced a curious reluctance to 
allow any of his friends to cross his threshold. The 
only one completely privileged in this matter was 
young Luke Andersen, whose gay urbanity was so 
insidious that it would have overcome the resistance 
of a Trappist monk. 

"Well, where are you proposing to take me to- 
night?" enquired Dangelis, when they had advanced 
in silence some distance up the hill. 

"To a place that will interest you, if your damned 
artistic tastes haven't quite spoiled your pleasure in 
little things!" 

"Not to the Seven Ashes again?" protested the 
American. "I know this lane leads up there." 

"You wait a little. We shall turn off presently," 
muttered his companion. "The truth is I am taking 
you on a sort of scouting expedition tonight." 

"What on earth do you mean?" 

"Well — if you must know, you shall know! I saw 
Miss Traffio yesterday and she asked me to keep an 
eye on Auber Lake tonight." 

"What? That place they were talking of? Where 
the wild-geese are?" 

Mr. Quincunx nodded. "It may, for all I know, 



258 WOOD AND STONE 

be a wild-goose chase. But I find your friend Gladys 
is up to her little tricks again — frightening people 
and upsetting their minds. And I promised Lacrima 
that you and I would stroll round that way — just 
to see that the girls don't come to any harm. Only 
we mustn't let them know we're there. Lacrima 
would never forgive me if Gladys saw us." 

"Do you mean to say that those two children are 
going to wander about these confounded damp woods 
of yours alone?" cried the American. 

"Look here, Mr. Dangelis, please understand this 
quite clearly. If you ever say a word to your 
precious Miss Gladys about this little scouting expe- 
dition, that's an end of our talks, forever and a day!" 

The citizen of Ohio bowed with a mock heroic 
gesture, removing his hat as he did so. 

"I submit to your conditions, Don Quixote. I am 
entirely at your service. Is it the idea that we 
should track our friends on hands and knees? I am 
quite ready even for that, but I know what these 
woods of yours are like." 

Mr. Quincunx vouchsafed no reply to this ill- 
timed jocosity. He was anxiously surveying the tall 
hedge upon their right hand. "Here's the way," he 
suddenly exclaimed. "Here's the path. We can hit 
a short-cut here that brings us straight through 
Camel's Cover, up to Wild Pine. Then we can slip 
down into Badger's Bottom and so into the Auber 
Woods." 

"But I thought the Auber Woods were much 
nearer than that. You told me the other day that 
you could get into the heart of them, in a quarter 
of an hour from your own garden!" 



AUBER LAKE 259 

"And so I can, my friend," replied Mr. Quincunx, 
scrambling up the bank into the field, and turning 
to offer his hand to his companion. "But it happens 
that this is the way those girls are coming. At any 
rate that is what she said. They were going to avoid 
my lane but they were going to enter the woods 
from the Seven Ashes side, just because it is so 
much nearer." 

"I submit, I submit," muttered the artist blandly. 
"I only hope this scouting business needn't commence 
till we have got well through Camel's Cover and 
Badger's Bottom! I must confess I am not alto- 
gether in love with the sound of those places, though 
no doubt they are harmless enough. But you people 
do certainly select the most extraordinary names for 
your localities. Our own little lapses in these things 
are classical compared with your Badgers and Camels 
and Ashes and Dead Men!" 

Mr. Quincunx did not condescend to reply to this. 
He continued to plough his way across the field, 
every now and then glancing nervously at the sky, 
which grew more and more threatening. Walking 
behind him and a little on one side, the American 
was singularly impressed by the appearance he 
presented, especially when the faint light of the 
pallid and cloud-flecked moon fell on his uplifted 
profile. With his corrugated brow and his pointed 
beard, Mr. Quincunx was a noticeable figure at any 
time, but under the present atmospheric conditions 
his lean form and striking head made a picture of 
forlorn desolation worthy of the sombre genius of a 
Bewick. 

Dangelis conceived the idea of a picture, which 



260 WOOD AND STONE 

he himself might be capable of evoking, with this 
melancholy, solitary figure as its protagonist. 

He wondered vaguely what background he would 
select as worthy of the resolute hopelessness in Mr. 
Quincunx's forlorn mien. 

It was only after they had traversed the sloping 
recesses of Camel's Cover, and had arrived at the 
crest of the Wild Pine ridge, that he was able to 
answer this question. Then he knew at once. The 
true pictorial background for his eccentric companion 
could be nothing less than that line of wind-shaken, 
rain-washed Scotch firs, which, visible from all por- 
tions of Nevilton, had gathered to themselves the 
very essence of its historic tragedy. 

These trees, like Mr. Quincunx, seemed to derive 
a grim satisfaction from their submission to destiny. 
Like him, they submitted with a definite volition of 
resolution. They took, as he took, the line of least 
resistance with a sort of stark voluptuousness. They 
did not simply bow to the winds and rains that op- 
pressed them. They positively welcomed them. And 
yet all the while, just as he did, they emitted a low 
melancholy murmur of protest, a murmur as com- 
pletely different from the howling eloquence of the 
ashes and elms, as it was different from the low 
querulous sob of the larches and elders. The rusty-red 
stain, too, in the rough bark of their trunks, was also 
singularly congruous with a certain reddish tinge, 
which often darkened the countenance of the recluse, 
especially when his fits of goblin-humour shook him 
into convulsive merriment. 

As they paused for a moment on this melancholy 
ridge, looking back at the flickering lights of the vil- 



AUBER LAKE 261 

lage, and down into the darkness in front of them, 
the painter made a mental vow that before he left 
Nevilton he would sublimate his vision of Mr. Quin- 
cunx into a genuine masterpiece. Plunging once 
more into the shadows, they followed a dark lane 
which finally emerged into a wide-sloping valley. In 
the depths of this was the secluded hollow, full of 
long grass and tufted reeds, which was the place 
known as Badger's Bottom. 

The entrance to Auber Wood was now at hand; 
and as they reached its sinister outskirts, they both 
instinctively paused to take stock of their surround- 
ings. The night was more sultry than ever. The 
leaves and grasses swayed with an almost impercep- 
tible movement, as if stirred, not by the wind, but by 
the actual heavy breathing of the Earth herself, 
troubled and agitated in her planetary sleep. 

Sombre banks of clouds moved intermittently over 
the face of a blurred moon, and, out of the soil at 
their feet, rose up damp exotic odours, giving the 
whole valley the atmosphere of an enormous hot- 
house. 

It was one of those hushed, steamy nights, preg- 
nant and listening, which the peculiar conditions of 
our English climate do not often produce, and which 
are for that very reason often quite startling in their 
emotional appeal. The path which the two men took, 
after once they had entered the wood, was one that 
led them through a gloomy tunnel of gigantic, over- 
hanging laurel-bushes. 

All the chief entrances to Auber Wood were 
edged with these exotics. Some capricious eighteenth- 
century Seldom, — perhaps the one who raised the 



262 WOOD AND STONE 

Tower of Pleasure on the site of the resting-place of 
the Holy Rood — had planted them there, and for more 
than a hundred years they had grown and multiplied. 

Auber Lake itself was the centre of a circumference 
of thick jungle-like brushwood which itself was over- 
shadowed by high sloping hills. These hills, also 
heavily wooded, formed a sort of gigantic cup or 
basin, and the level expanse of undergrowth they 
enclosed was itself the margin of a yet deeper con- 
cavity, in the middle of which was the lake-bed. 

Mingling curiously with the more indigenous trees 
in this place were several unusual and alien importa- 
tions. Some of these, like the huge laurels they were 
now passing under, belonged more properly to gar- 
dens than to woods. Others were of a still stranger 
and more foreign nature, and produced a very bizarre 
effect where they grew, as though one had suddenly 
come upon the circle of some heathen grove, in the 
midst of an English forest. Auber Lake was cer- 
tainly a spot of an unusual character. Once it had 
been drained, and a large monolith, of the same stone 
as that produced by Leo's Hill, had been discovered 
embedded in the mud. Traces were said to have 
been discerned upon this of ancient human carving, 
but local antiquarianism had contradicted this 
rumour. At least it may be said that nowhere else 
on the Romer estate, except perhaps in Nevilton 
churchyard, was the tawny-colored clay which bore 
so close a symbolic, if not a geological, relation to 
the famous yellow sandstone, more heavily and 
malignantly clinging, in its oozy consistence. 

Dangelis and Mr. Quincunx advanced slowly, and 
in profound silence, along their overshadowed path. 



AUBER LAKE 263 

An occasional wood-pigeon, disturbed in its roost- 
ing, flapped awkwardly through the branches; and 
far away, in another part of the wood, sounded at 
intervals the melancholy cry of a screech-owl. 

Great leather-winged bats flitted over their heads 
with queer unearthly little cries; and every now and 
then some agitated moth, from the under-bushes, 
fluttered heavily across their faces. Sometimes in 
the darkness their feet stumbled upon a dead 
branch, but more often they slipped uneasily in 
the deep ruts left in the mud by the woodmen's 
carts. 

All the various intermittent noises they heard only 
threw the palpable stillness of the place into heavier 
relief. 

The artist from the wind-swept plains of Ohio felt 
as though he had never plunged so deeply into the 
indrawn recesses of the earth-powers as he was doing 
now. It seemed to him as though they were approach- 
ing the guarded precincts of some dark and crouch- 
ing idol. It was as if, by some ill-omened mistake, 
they had stumbled unawares upon a spot that through 
interminable ages had been forbidden to human 
tread. 

And yet the place seemed to expect them, to await 
them; to have in reserve for them some laboured 
pregnancy of woeful significance. 

Once more, as he walked behind Mr. Quincunx, 
Dangelis was startled by the extraordinary congruity 
of that forlorn figure with the occasion and the 
scene. The form of the recluse seemed to exhale a 
reciprocity of fearful brooding. Auber Wood seemed 
aware of him, and ready to welcome him, in con- 



264 WOOD AND STONE 

sentaneous sympathy. He might have been the long- 
expected priest of some immemorial rites transacted 
there, the priest of some old heathen worship, perhaps 
the worship of generations of dead people, buried 
under those damp leaves. 

It seemed a long while to Ralph Dangelis, in spite 
of the breathless quickening of his imagination, before 
the laurel-tunnel thinned away, and the two men 
were able to walk side by side between the trunks of 
the larger trees. Here again they encountered 
Scotch firs. 

What strange dream, of what fantastic possessor 
of this solitude, had shaped itself into the planting 
of these moorland giants, among the native-born 
oaks and beeches of this weird place? 

The open spaces at the foot of the tree-trunks 
were filled with an obscure mass of oozy stalks and 
heavily drooping leaves. The obscurity of the spot 
made it difficult to discern the differences between 
these rank growths; but the ghostly flowers of enor- 
mous hemlocks stood forth form among the rest. 
Fungoid excrescences, of some sort or another, were 
certainly prolific here. Their charnel-house odour 
set Dangelis thinking of a morgue he had once 
visited. 

At last — and with quite startling suddenness — 
the path they followed emerged into a wide open 
expanse; and there, — under the diffused light of the 
cloud-darkened moon — they saw stretched at their 
feet the dim surface of Auber Lake. 

Mr. Quincunx stood for a moment motionless and 
silent, leaning upon his stick. Then he turned to 
his companion; and the American noticed how vague 



AUBER LAKE 265 

and shadowy his face looked, as if it were a face 
seen through some more opaque medium than that 
of air. 

They sat down together upon a fallen log; and out 
of an instinctive desire to break the tension of the 
spell that lay on him Dangelis lit a cigarette. 

He had smoked in silence for some moments, 
when Mr. Quincunx, who had been listening atten- 
tively, raised his hand. "Hark!" he said, "do you 
hear anything?" 

Across the stillness of the water came a low blood- 
curdling wail. It was hardly a human sound, and 
yet it was not like the voice of any bird or beast. 
It seemed to unsettle the drowsy natives of the 
spot; for a harsh twittering of sedge-birds answered 
it, and a great water-rat splashed down into the 
lake. 

"God! they were right then," whispered the 
American. "They spoke of some mad girl living 
down here, but I did not believe them. It seemed 
incredible that such a thing should be allowed. 
Quick, my friend! — we ought to warn those girls 
at once and get them away. This is not the sort of 
thing for them to hear." 

They both rose and listened intently, but the sound 
was not repeated; only a hot gust of wind coming, as 
it were, out of the lake itself, went quivering through 
the reeds. 

"I don't imagine," said Mr. Quincunx calmly, 
"that your young lady will be much alarmed. I 
fancy she has less fear of this kind of thing than that 
water-rat we heard just now. It'll terrify Lacrima, 
though. But I understand that your charming sweet- 



266 WOOD AND STONE 

heart gets a good deal of amusement from causing 
people to feel terror!" 

Dangelis was so accustomed to the plain-spoken 
utterances of the hermit of Dead Man's Lane that 
he received this indictment of his enchantress with 
complete equanimity. 

"All the same," he remarked, "I think we'd better 
go and meet them, if you know the direction they're 
coming. It's not a very pleasant proposition, any 
way, to face escaped lunatics in a place like this." 

"I tell you," mutterd Mr. Quincunx crossly, "your 
darling Gladys is coming here for no other reason 
than to hear that girl's cries. The more they terrify 
Lacrima, the better she'll be pleased." 

"I don't know about Lacrima," answered Dangelis. 
"I know that devil of a noise will scare me if I hear 
it again." 

Mr. Quincunx did not reply. With his hand on 
his companion's arm he was once more listening 
intently. At the back of his mind was gradually 
forming a grim remote wish that some overt act and 
palpable revelation of Gladys Romer's interesting 
character might effect a change of heart in the 
citizen of Ohio. 

Such a wish had been obscurely present in his 
brain ever since they started on this expedition; and 
now that the situation was developing, it took a 
more vivid shape. 

"I believe," he remarked at last, "I hear them 
coming down the path. Listen! It's on the other 
side of the pond, — over there." He pointed across 
the water to the left-hand corner of the lake. It 
was from the right-hand corner, where the keeper's 



AUBER LAKE 267 

cottage stood, that the poor mad girl's voice had 
proceeded. 

"Yes; I am sure!" he whispered after a moment's 
pause. "Come! quick! get in here; then they won't 
see us even if they walk round this way." 

He pulled Dangelis beneath the over-hanging boughs 
of a large weeping willow. The droop of this tree's 
delicate foliage made, in the semi-darkness in 
which they were, a complete and impenetrable 
hiding-place; and yet from between the trailing 
branches, when they held them apart with their 
hands, they had a free and unimpeded view of the 
whole surface of the lake. 

The sound of distant voices struck clearly now upon 
their ears; and a moment after, nudging his com- 
panion, Mr. Quincunx pointed to two cloaked figures 
advancing across the open space towards the water's 
edge. 

"Hush!" whispered the recluse. "They are bound 
to come this way now." 

The two girls were, however, for the moment, ap- 
parently occupied with another intention. The taller 
of the two stopped and picked up something from 
the ground, and then approaching close to the lake's 
edge raised her arm and flung it far into the water. 

The object she threw must have been a stick or a 
stone of considerable size, for the splash it produced 
was startling. 

The result was also startling. From a little island 
in the middle of the lake, rose suddenly, with a tre- 
mendous flapping, several large and broad-winged 
birds. They flew in heavy circles, at first, over the 
island; and then, descending to the water's level, 



268 WOOD AND STONE 

went splashing and flapping across its surface, utter- 
ing strange cries. 

The noise made by these birds had hardly subsided, 
as they settled down in a thick bed of reeds, when, 
once more, that terrible inhuman wail rang out upon 
the night. Both men peered forth anxiously from 
their hiding-place, to see the effect of this sound upon 
their two friends. 

They could see that they both stood stone-still 
for a moment as if petrified by terror. 

Then they noticed that the taller of the two drew 
her companion still nearer to the water's edge. 

"If that yell begins again," whispered the Ameri- 
can, "I shall go out and speak to them." 

Mr. Quincunx made no answer. He prayed in his 
heart that something would occur to initiate this 
innocent Westerner a little more closely into the 
workings of his inamorata's mind. It seemed indeed 
quite within the bounds of possibility that the recluse 
might be gratified in this wish, for the girls began 
rapidly advancing towards them, skirting the edge of 
the lake. 

The two men watched their approach in silence, 
the artist savouring with a deep imaginative excite- 
ment the mystical glamour of the scene. 

He felt it would be indelibly and forever imprinted 
on his mind, this hot heavily scented night, this 
pallid-glimmering lake, those uneasy stirrings of the 
wild-geese in their obscure reed-bed, and the fright- 
ful hush of the listening woods, as they seemed to 
await a repetition of that unearthly cry. 

The girls had actually paused at the verge of the 
lake, just in front of their hiding-place; so near, in 



AUBER LAKE 269 

fact, that by stretching out his arm, from behind 
his willowy screen, Dangelis could have touched 
Gladys on the shoulder, when the fearfully expected 
voice broke forth again upon the night. 

The men could see the visible tremor of panic-fear 
quiver through Lacrima's slight frame. 

"Oh, let us go! — let us go!" she pleaded, pulling 
with feverish fingers at her companion's cloak. 

But Gladys folded her arms and flung back her 
head. 

"Little coward!" she murmured in a low unshaken 
voice. "I am not afraid of a mad girl's yelling. 
Look! there's one of those birds going back to the 
island!" 

Once more the inhuman wail trembled across the 
water. 

"Gladys! Gladys dear!" cried the panic-stricken 
girl, "I cannot endure it! I shall go mad myself if 
we do not go! I'll do anything you ask me! I'll 
go anywhere with you! Only — please — let us go 
away now!" 

The sound was repeated again, and this time it 
proceeded from a quarter much nearer them. All 
four listeners held their breath. Presently the Italian 
made a terrified gesture and pointed frantically to 
the right bank of the lake. 

"I see her!" she cried, "I see her! She is coming 
towards us!" 

The frightened girl made a movement as if she 
would break away from her companion and flee into 
the darkness of the trees. 

Gladys clasped her firmly in her arms. 

"No — no!" she said, "no running off! Remember 



270 WOOD AND STONE 

our agreement! There's nothing really to be afraid 
of. I'm not afraid." 

A slight quiver in her voice a little belied the calm- 
ness of this statement. She was indeed torn at that 
moment between a very natural desire to escape 
herself and an insatiable craving to prolong her 
companion's agitation. 

In her convulsive terror the Italian, unable to free 
herself from the elder girl's enfolding arms, buried 
her head in the other's cloak. 

Thus linked, the two might have posed for a pic- 
ture of heroic sisterly solicitude, in the presence of 
extreme danger. 

Once more that ghastly cry resounded through the 
silence; and several nocturnal birds, from distant por- 
tions of the wood, replied to it with their melancholy 
hootings. 

The white-garbed figure of the mad girl, her arms 
tossed tragically above her head, came swaying 
towards them. She moved unevenly, and staggered 
in her advance, as if her volition had not complete 
power over her movements. Gladys was evidently 
considerably alarmed herself now. She clutched at 
a chance of combining escape with triumph. 

"Say you let me off that promise!" she whispered 
hoarsely, "and we'll run together! We're quite 
close to the way out." 

Who can read the obscure recesses of the human 
mind, or gauge the supernatural strength that lurks 
amid the frailest nerves? 

This reference to her sublime contract was the one 
thing needed to rouse the abandoned soul of the 
Pariah. For one brief second more the powers of 



AUBER LAKE 271 

darkness struggled over her bowed head with the 
powers of light. 

Then with a desperate movement the Italian rose 
erect, flung aside her cousin's arms, turned boldly 
towards the approaching maniac, and ran straight to 
meet her. Her unexpected appearance produced 
an immediate effect upon the unhappy girl. Her 
wildly-tossing arms fell to her side. Her wailing 
died away in pathetic sobs, and these also quickly 
ceased. 

Lacrima seemed to act like one possessed of some 
invincible magic. One might have dreamed that now 
for the first time for uncounted ages this unholy 
shrine of heathen tradition was invaded by an emis- 
sary of the true Faith. 

Gladys, who had reeled bewildered against the wood- 
work of an ancient weir, that formed the outlet to 
the lake, leaned in complete prostration of astonish- 
ment upon this support, and gazed helplessly and 
dumbly at the two figures. She was too petrified 
with amazement to notice the appearance of Ralph 
and Maurice, who, also absorbed in watching this 
strange encounter, had half-emerged from their 
concealment. 

The three onlookers saw the Italian lay her hands 
upon the girl's forehead, smooth back her hair, kiss 
her gently on the brow, and fling her own cloak over 
her bare shoulders. They heard her murmuring 
again and again some soft repetition of soothing 
words. Dangelis caught the liquid syllables of the 
Tuscan tongue. Evidently in her excitement the 
child of Genoa the Superb had reverted to the lan- 
guage of her fathers. 



272 WOOD AND STONE 

The next thing they saw was the slow retreat of the 
two together, towards the keeper's cottage; the arm 
of the Italian clinging tenderly round the maniac's 
waist. 

At this point Dangelis stepped forward and made 
himself known to Gladys. 

The expression on the face of Mr. Romer's 
daughter, when she recognized the American, was a 
palimpsest of conflicting emotions. Her surprise was 
still more intense when Mr. Quincunx stepped out 
from the shadow of the drooping tree and raised his 
hat to her. Her eyes for the moment looked posi- 
tively scared; and her mouth opened, like the mouth 
of a bewildered infant. The tone with which the 
citizen of Ohio addressed the confused young lady 
made the heart of Mr. Quincunx leap for joy. 

"I am astonished at you," he said. "I should not 
have believed such a thing possible! Your only excuse 
is that this infernal jest of yours has turned out so 
well for the people concerned, and so shamefully for 
yourself. How could you treat that brave foreign 
child so brutally? Why — I saw her trembling and 
trembling, and trying to get away; and you were 
holding — actually holding her — while that poor 
mad thing came nearer! It's a good thing for you 
that the Catholic spirit in her burst out at last. Do 
you know what spell she used to bring that girl to 
her senses? A spell that you will never understand, 
my friend, for all this baptism and confirmation 
business ! Why — she quoted passages out of the 
Litany of Our Lady ! I heard her clearly, and I recog- 
nized the words. I am a damned atheist myself, 
but if ever I felt religion to be justified it was when 



AUBER LAKE 273 

your cousin stopped that girl's crying. It was like 
real magic. You ought to be thoroughly proud of 
her! I shall tell her when I see her what I feel about 
her." 

Gladys rose from her seat on the weir and faced 
them haughtily. Her surprise once over, and the 
rebuke having fallen, she became mistress of herself 
again. 

"I suppose," she said, completely ignoring Mr. Quin- 
cunx, "we'd better follow those two, and see if La- 
crima gets her safely into the house. I fancy she'll 
have no difficulty about it. Of course if she had not 
done this I should have had to do it myself. But 
not knowing Italian" — she added this with a sneer 
— "I am not so suitable a mad-house nurse." 

"It was her good heart, Gladys," responded the 
American; "not her Italian, nor her Litany, that 
soothed that girl's mind. I wish your heart, my 
friend, were half as good." 

"Well," returned the fair girl quite cheerfully, 
"we'll leave my heart for the present, and see how 
Lacrima has got on." 

She took the arm which Dangelis had not offered, 
but which his chivalry forbade him to refuse, and 
together they proceeded to follow the heroic Genoese. 

Mr. Quincunx shuffled unregarded behind them. 

They had hardly reached the keeper's cottage, a 
desolate and ancient erection, of the usual stone 
material, darkened with damp and overshadowed by 
a moss-grown oak, when Lacrima herself came towards 
them. 

She started with surprise at seeing, in the shadowy 
obscurity, the figures of the two men. 



274 WOOD AND STONE 

Her surprise changed to pleasure when she recog- 
nized their identity. 

"Ah!" she said. "You come too late. Gladys 
and I have had quite an adventure, haven't we, 
cousin : 

Mr. Quincunx glanced at the American to see if he 
embraced the full generosity of the turn she gave to 
the situation. 

Gladys took advantage of it in a moment. "You 
see I was right after all," she remarked. "I knew 
you would lose your alarm directly you saw that 
girl! When it came to the point you were braver 
than I. You dear thing!" She kissed the Italian 
ostentatiously, and then retook possession of her 
admirer's arm. 

"I got her up to her room without waking her 
father," said Lacrima. "She had left the door wide 
open. Gladys is going to ask Mr. Romer to have her 
sent away to some sort of home. I believe they'll 
be able to cure her. She talked quite sensibly to 
me. I am sure she only wants to be treated gently. 
I'm afraid her father's unkind to her. You are going 
to arrange for her being sent away, aren't you, 
Gladys?" 

The elder girl turned. "Of course, my dear, of 
course. I don't go back on my word." 

The four friends proceeded to take the nearest 
path through the wood. One by one the frightened 
wild-geese returned to their roosting-place on the 
island. The water-rats resumed uninterrupted their 
night-prowls along the reedy edge of the lake, and 
the wood-pigeons settled down in peace upon their 
high branches. 



AUBER LAKE 275 

Long before Dead Man's Lane was reached the 
two couples had drifted conveniently apart in their 
lingering return. 

Mr. Quincunx had seldom been more tender 
towards his little friend than he was that night; and 
Lacrima, still strangely happy in the after-ebb of her 
supernatural exultation, nestled closely to his side as 
they drifted leisurely across the fields. 

In what precise manner the deeply-betrayed Gladys 
regained the confidence of her lover need not be 
related. The artist from Ohio would have been ada- 
mantine indeed, could he have resisted the appeal 
which the amorous telepathy of this magnetic young 
person gave her the power of expressing. 

Meanwhile, in her low-pitched room, with the 
shadow of the oak-tree coming and going across her 
face, as the moonlight shone out or faded, Nance 
Purvis lay placidly asleep, dreaming no more of 
strange phantoms or of stinging whips, but of gentle 
spirits from some translunar region, who caressed her 
forehead with hands softer than moth's wings and 
spoke to her in a tongue that was like the moonlight 
itself made audible. 



CHAPTER XIII 

LACRIMA 

MR. JOHN GORING was feeding his rabbits. 
In the gross texture of his clayish nature 
there were one or two curious layers of a 
pleasanter material. One of these, for instance, was 
now shown in the friendly equanimity with which he 
permitted a round-headed awkward youth, more than 
half idiotic, to assist him at this innocent task. 

Between Mr. Goring and Bert Leerd there existed 
one of those inexplicable friendships, which so often, 
to the bewilderment of moral philosophers, bring a 
twilight of humanity into the most sinister mental 
caves. The farmer had saved this youth from a con- 
spiracy of Poor-Law officials who were on the point 
of consigning him to an asylum. He had assumed 
responsibility for his good-behaviour and had given 
him a lodging — his parents being both dead — in the 
Priory itself. 

Not a few young servant-girls, selected by Mr. 
Goring rather for their appearance than their dispo- 
sition, had been dismissed from his service, after 
violent and wrathful scenes, for being caught teasing 
this unfortunate; and even the cook, a female of the 
most taciturn and sombre temper, was compelled to 
treat him with comparative consideration. The gos- 
sips of Nevilton swore, as one may believe, that the 
farmer, in being kind to this boy, was only obeying 



LACRIMA 277 



the mandate of nature; but no one who had ever 
beheld Bert's mother, gave the least credence to such 
a story. 

Another of Mr. Goring's softer aspects was his 
mania for tame rabbits. These he kept in commodi- 
ous and spacious hutches at the back of his house, 
and every year wonderful and interesting additions 
were added to their number. 

On this particular morning both the farmer and 
his idiot were absorbed and rapt in contemplation be- 
fore the gambols of two large new pets — great silky 
lop-eared things — who had arrived the night before. 
Mr. Goring was feeding them with fresh lettuces, 
carefully handed to him by his assistant, who divested 
these plants of their rough outer leaves and dried 
them on the palms of his hands. 

"The little 'un do lap 'em up fastest, master," 
remarked the boy. "I mind how those others, with 
them girt ears, did love a fresh lettuce." 

Mr. Goring watched with mute satisfaction the 
quivering nostrils and nibbling mouth of the dainty 
voracious creature. 

"Mustn't let them have more than three at a 
time, Bert," he remarked. "But they do love them, 
as you say." 

"What be going to call this little 'un, master?" 
asked the boy. 

Mr. Goring straightened his back and drew a deep 
breath. 

"What do you think, Bert, my boy?" he cried, in 
a husky excited tone, prodding his assistant jocosely 
with the handle of his riding- whip; "what do you 
think? What would you call her?" 



278 WOOD AND STONE 

"Ah! I knew she were a she, master!" chuckled 
the idiot. "I knew that, afore she were out of the 
packer-case! Call 'er?" and the boy leered an inde- 
scribable leer. "By gum! I can tell 'ee that fast 
enough. Call 'er Missy Lacrima, pretty little Missy 
Lacrima, wot lives up at the House, and wot is going 
to be missus 'ere afore long." 

Mr. Goring surveyed his protege for a moment 
with sublime contentment, and then humorously 
flicked at his ears with his whip. 

"Right! my imp of Satan. Right! my spawn of 
Belial. That is just what I was thinking." 

"She be silky and soft to handle," went on the 
idiot, "and her, up at the House, be no contrary, 
or I'm darned mistaken." 

Mr. Goring expressed his satisfaction at his friend's 
intelligence by giving him a push that nearly threw 
him backwards. 

"And I'll tell you this, my boy," he remarked confi- 
dentially, surveying the long line of well-filled hutches, 
"we've never yet bought such a rabbit, as this foreign 
one will turn out, or you and I be damned fools." 

"The young lady '11 get mighty fond of these 'ere 
long-ears, looks so to me," observed the youth. "Hope 
she won't be a feeding 'em with wet cabbage, same 
as maids most often do." 

The farmer grew even more confidential, drawing 
close to his assistant and addressing him in the tone 
customary with him on market-days, when feeling 
the ribs of fatted cattle. 

"That same young lady is coming up here this 
morning, Bert," he remarked significantly. "The 
squire's giving her a note to bring along." 



LACRIMA 279 



"And you be going to bring matters to a head, 
master," rejoined the boy. "That's wise and thought- 
ful of 'ee, choosing time, like, and season, as the Book 
says. Maids be wonderful sly when the sun's down, 
while of mornings they be meek as guinea-fowls." 

The appearance of the Priory servant — no very 
demure figure — put a sudden stop to these touching 
confidences. 

"Miss Lacrima, with a note, in the front Parlour!" 
the damsel shouted. 

"You needn't call so loud, girl," grumbled the 
farmer. "And how often must I tell you to say 
'Miss Traffio,' not 'Miss Lacrima'?" 

The girl tossed her head and pouted her lips. 

"A person isn't used to waiting on foreigners," she 
muttered. 

Mr. Goring's only reply to this remark was to 
pinch her arm unmercifully. He then pushed her 
aside, and entering the kitchen, walked rapidly 
through to the front of the house. The front parlour 
in the Priory was nothing more or less than the old 
entrance-gate of the Cistercian Monastery, preserved 
through four centuries, with hardly a change. 

The roof was high and vaulted. In the centre of 
the vault a great many-petalled rose, carved in 
Leonian stone, seemed to gather all the curves and 
lines of the masonry together, and hold them in 
religious concentration. 

The fire-place — a thing of more recent, but still 
sufficiently ancient date — displayed the delicate and 
gracious fantasy of some local Jacobean artist, who 
had lavished upon its ornate mouldings a more per- 
sonal feeling than one is usually aware of in these 



280 WOOD AND STONE 

things. In place of a fire the wide grate was, at this 
moment, full of new-grown bracken fronds, evidently 
recently picked, for they were still fresh and green. 

In front of the fire-place stood Lacrima with the 
letter in her hand. Had Mr. Goring been a little less 
persuaded of the "meekness" of this young person, 
he would have recognized something not altogether 
friendly to himself and his plans in the strained white 
face she raised to him and the stiff gloved hand she 
extended. 

He begged her to be seated. She waved aside the 
chair he offered, and handed him the letter. He tore 
this open and glanced carelessly at its contents. 

The letter was indeed brief enough, containing 
nothing but the following gnomic words: "Refusal 
or no refusal," signed with an imperial flourish. 

He flung it down on the table, and came to business 
at once. 

"You mustn't let that little mistake of Auber 
Great Meadow mean anything, missie," he said. 
"You were too hasty with a fellow that time — too 
hasty and coy-like. Those be queer maids' tricks, 
that crying and running! But, bless my heart! 
I don't bear you any grudge for it. You needn't 
think it." 

He advanced a step — while she retreated, very 
pale and very calm, her little fingers clasped nervously 
together. She managed to keep the table between 
them, so that, barring a grotesque and obvious pur- 
suit of her, she was well out of his reach. 

"I have a plain and simple offer to make to you, 
my dear," he continued, "and it is one that can do 
you no hurt or shame. I am not one of those who 



LACRIMA 281 



waste words in courting a girl, least of all a young 
lady of education like yourself. The fact is, I am 
a lonely man — without wife or child — and as far 
as I know no relations on earth, except brother 
Mortimer. And I have a pretty tidy sum laid up in 
Yeoborough Bank, and the farm is a good farm. I 
do not say that the house is all that could be wished; 
but 'tis a pretty house, too, and one that could stand 
improvement. In plain words, dearie, what I want 
you to say now is 'y es >' an d no nonsense, — for what 
I am doing," his voice became quite husky at this 
point, as if her propinquity really did cause him some 
emotion, "is asking you, point-blank, and no beating 
about the bush, whether you will marry me!" 

Lacrima's face during this long harangue would 
have formed a strange picture for any old Cister- 
cian monk shadowing that ancient room. At first she 
had kept unmoved her strained and tensely-strung 
impassivity. But by degrees, as the astounding 
character of the man's communication began to dawn 
upon her, her look changed into one of sheer blind 
terror. When the final fatal word crossed the 
farmer's lips, she put her hand to her throat as though 
to suppress an actual cry. She had never looked 
for this; — not in her wildest dreams of what destiny, 
in this curst place, could inflict upon her. This 
surpassed the worst of possible imagination! It was 
a deep below the deep. She found herself at first 
completely unable to utter a word. She could only 
make a vague helpless gesture with her hand as 
though dumbly waving the whole world away. 

Then at last with a terrible effort she broke the 
silence. 



282 WOOD AND STONE 

"What you say is utterly — utterly impossible! 
It is — it is too — " 

She could not go on. But she had said enough to 
carry, even to a brain composed of pure clay, the 
conviction that the acquiescence he demanded was 
not a thing to be easily won. He thought of his 
brother-in-law's enigmatic note. Possibly the owner 
of Leo's Hill had ways of persuading recalcitrant 
foreign girls that were quite hidden from him. The 
psychological irony of the thing lay in the fact that 
in proportion as her terror increased, his desire for 
her increased proportionally. Had she been willing, — 
had she been even passive and indifferent, — the curi- 
ous temperament of Mr. Goring would have been 
scarcely stirred. He might have gone on pursuing 
her, out of spite or out of obstinacy; but the pursuit 
would have been no more than an interlude, a dis- 
traction, among his other affairs. 

But that look of absolute terror on her face — the 
look of a hunted animal under the hot breath of the 
hounds — appealed to something profoundly deep in 
his nature. Oddly enough — such are the eccen- 
tricities of the human mind — the very craving to 
possess her which her terror excited, was accompanied 
by a rush of extraordinary pity for himself as the 
object of her distaste. 

He let her pass — making no movement to inter- 
rupt her escape. He let her hurry out of the garden 
and into the road — without a word; but as soon as 
she was gone, he sat down on the wooden seat under 
the front of the house and resting his head upon his 
chin began blubbering like a great baby. Big salt 
tears fell from his small pig's eyes, rolled down his 



LACRIMA 283 



tanned cheeks, and falling upon the dust caked it 
into little curious globules. 

Two wandering ants of a yellowish species, dragging 
prisoner after them one of a black kind, encountered 
these minute globes of sand and sorrow, and explored 
them with interrogatory feelers. 

Mingled with this feeling of pity for himself under 
the girl's disdain was a remarkable wave of immense 
tenderness and consideration for her. Short of letting 
her escape him, how delicately he would cherish, how 
tenderly he would pet and fondle her, how assiduously 
he would care for her! The consciousness of this 
emotion of soft tenderness towards the girl increased 
his pity for himself under the weight of the girl's 
contempt. How ungrateful she was! And yet that 
very look of terror, that stifled cry of the hunted 
hare, which made him so resolved to win her, pro- 
duced in him an exquisite feeling of melting regard 
for her youth, her softness, her fragility. When she 
did belong to him, oh how tenderly he would treat 
her! How he would humour her and give her every- 
thing she could want! 

The shadowy Cistercian monks would no doubt, 
from their clairvoyant catholic knowledge of the 
subtleties of the human soul, have quite understood 
the cause of those absurd tears caking the dust under 
that wooden seat. But the yellowish ants continued 
to be very perplexed and confused by their presence. 
Thunder-drops tasting of salt were no doubt as 
strange to them as hail-stones tasting of wine would 
have been to Mr. Goring. But the ants were not the 
only creatures amazed at this new development in 
the psychology of the man of clay. From one corner 



284 WOOD AND STONE 

of the house peeped the servant-girl, full of tremulous 
curiosity, and from another the idiot Bert shuffled 
and spied, full of most anxious and perturbed concern. 

Meanwhile the innocent cause of this little drama 
was making her way with drooping head and drag- 
ging steps down the south drive. When she reached 
the house she was immediately informed by one of 
the servants that Mr. Romer wished to see her in the 
study. 

She was so dazed and broken, so forlorn and indif- 
ferent, that she made her way straight to this room 
without pause or question. 

She found Mr. Romer in a most lively and affable 
mood. He made her sit down opposite him, and 
handed her chocolates out of a decorative Parisian 
box which lay on the table. 

"Well, young lady," he said, "I know, without 
your telling me, that an important event has oc- 
curred! Indeed, to confess the truth, I have, for a 
long time, foreseen its occurrence. And what did you 
answer to my worthy brother's flattering proposal? It 
isn't every girl, in your peculiar position, who is as 
lucky as this. Come — don't be shy! There is no 
need for shyness with me. What did you say to 
him?" 

Lacrima looked straight in front of her out of the 
window. She saw the waving branches of a great 
dark yew-tree and above it the white clouds. She 
felt like one whose guardian-angel has deserted her, 
leaving her the prey of blind elemental forces. 
She thought vaguely in her mind that she would 
make a desperate appeal to Vennie Seldom. Some- 
thing in Vennie gave her a consciousness of strength. 



LACRIMA 285 



To this strength, at the worst, she would cling for 
help. She was thus in a measure fortified in advance 
against any outburst in which her employer might 
indulge. But Mr. Romer indulged in no outburst. 

"I suppose," he said calmly, "that I may take for 
granted that you have refused my good brother's 
offer?" 

Lacrima nodded, without speaking. 

"That is quite what I expected. You would not 
be yourself if you had not done so. And since you 
have done so it is of course quite impossible for me 
to put any pressure upon you." 

He paused and carefully selecting the special kind 
of chocolate that appealed to him put it deliberately 
in his mouth. 

Lacrima was so amazed at the mild tone he used 
and at the drift of his words, that she turned full 
upon him her large liquid eyes with an expression 
in them of something almost like gratitude. The cor- 
ners of her mouth twitched. The reaction was too 
great. She felt she could not keep back her tears. 

Mr. Romer quietly continued. 

"In all these things, my dear young lady, the world 
presents itself as a series of bargains and com- 
promises. My brother has made you his offer — 
a flattering and suitable one. In the girlish excite- 
ment of the first shock you have totally refused to 
listen to him. But the world moves round. Such 
natural moods do not last forever. They often do 
not last beyond the next day! In order to help you 
— to make it easier for you — to bring such a mood 
to an end, I also, in my turn, have a little proposal 
to make." 



286 WOOD AND STONE 

Lacrima's expression changed with terrible rapidity; 
she stared at him panic-stricken. 

"My proposal is this," said Mr. Romer, quietly 
handing her the box of chocolates, and smiling as she 
waved it away. "As I said just now, the world is a 
place of bargains and compromises. Nothing ever 
occurs between human beings which is not the result 
of some unuttered transaction of occult diplomacy. 
Led by your instincts you reject my brother's offer. 
Led by my instincts I offer you the following per- 
suasion to overcome your refusal." 

He placed another chocolate in his mouth. 

"I know well," he went on, "your regard and fond- 
ness — I might use even stronger words — for our 
friend Maurice Quincunx. Now what I propose is 
this. I will settle upon Maurice, — you shall see 
the draft itself and my signature upon it, — an income 
sufficient to enable him to live comfortably and hap- 
pily, wherever he pleases, without doing a stroke of 
work, and without the least anxiety. I will arrange 
it so that he cannot touch the capital of the sum 
I make over to him, and has nothing to do but to 
sign receipts for each quarter's dividend, as the bank 
makes them over to him. 

"The sum I will give him will be so considerable, 
that the income from it will amount to not less than 
three hundred pounds a year. With this at his dis- 
posal he will be able to live wherever he likes, either 
here or elsewhere. And what is more," — here Mr. 
Romer looked intently and significantly at the trem- 
bling girl — " what is more, he will be in a position 
to marry whenever he may desire to do so. I believe" 
— he could not refrain from a tone of sardonic irony 



LACRIMA 287 



as he added this — "that you have found him not 
particularly well able to look after himself. I shall 
sign this document, rendering your friend free from 
financial anxiety for the rest of his life, on the day 
when you are married to Mr. Goring." 

When he had finished speaking Lacrima continued 
to stare at him with a wide horror-struck gaze. 

Mechanically she noticed the peculiar way in 
which his eyebrows met one another across a scar 
on his forehead. This scar and the little grey bristles 
that crossed it remained in her mind long afterwards, 
indelibly associated with the thoughts that then 
passed through her brain. Chief among these thoughts 
was a deep-lurking, heart-clutching dread of her own 
conscience, and a terrible shapeless fear that this sub- 
terranean conscience might debar her from the right 
to make her appeal to Vennie. From Mr. Romer's per- 
secution she could appeal; but how could she appeal 
against his benevolence to her friend, even though the 
path of that benevolence lay over her own body? 

She rose from her seat, too troubled and confused 
even to hate the man who thus played the part of 
an ironic Providence. 

"Let me go," she said, waving aside once more the 
bright-coloured box of chocolates which he had the 
diabolical effrontery to offer her again. "Let me go. 
I want to be alone. I want to think." 

He opened the door for her, and she passed out. 
Once out of his presence she rushed madly upstairs 
to her own room, flung herself on the bed, and re- 
mained, for what seemed to her like centuries of 
horror, without movement and without tears, staring 
up at the ceiling. 



288 WOOD AND STONE 

The luncheon bell sounded, but she did not heed 
it. From the open window floated in the smell of 
the white cluster-roses, scented like old wine, which 
encircled the terrace pillars. Blending with this 
fragrance came the interminable voice of the wood- 
pigeons, and every now and then a sharp wild cry, 
from the peacocks on the east lawn. Two — three 
hours passed thus, and still she did not move. A 
certain queer-shaped crack above the door occupied 
her superficial attention, very much in the same way 
as the scar on Mr. Romer's forehead. Any very 
precise formulation of her thoughts during this long 
period would be difficult to state. 

Her mind had fallen into that confused and feverish 
bewilderment that comes to us in hours between 
sleeping and waking. The clearest image that shaped 
itself to her consciousness during these hours was the 
image of herself as dead, and, by means of her death, 
of Maurice Quincunx being freed from his hated 
office-work, and enabled to live according to his 
pleasure. She saw him walking to and fro among 
rows of evening primroses — his favourite flowers — 
and in place of a cabbage-leaf — so fantastic were her 
dreams — she saw his heavy head ornamented with 
a broad, new Panama-hat, purchased with the price 
of her death. 

Her mind gave no definite shape or form to this 
image of herself dying. The thought of it followed 
so naturally from the idea of a union with the 
Priory-tenant, that there seemed no need to separate 
the two things. To marry Mr. John Goring was just 
a simple sentence of death. The only thing to make 
sure of, was that before she actually died, this 



LACRIMA 289 



precious document, liberating her friend forever, 
should be signed and sealed. Oddly enough she never 
for a moment doubted Mr. Romer's intention of carry- 
ing out his part of the contract if she carried out hers. 
As he had said, the world was designed and arranged 
for bargains between men and women; and if her 
great bargain meant the putting of life itself into 
the scale — well ! she was ready. 

Strangely enough, the final issue of her feverish 
self-communings was a sense of deep and indescribable 
peace. It was more of a relief to her than anyone 
not acquainted with the peculiar texture of a Pariah's 
mind could realize, to be spared that desperate appeal 
to Vennie Seldom. In a dumb inarticulate way she 
felt that, without making such an appeal, the spirit 
of the Nevilton nun was supporting and strengthen- 
ing her. Did Vennie know of her dilemma, she would 
be compelled to resort to some drastic step to stop 
the sacrifice, just as one would be compelled to hold 
out a hand of rescue to some determined suicide. But 
she felt in the depths of her heart that if Vennie 
were in her position she would make the same 
choice. 

The long afternoon was still only half over, when — 
comforted and at peace with herself, as a devoted 
patriot might be at peace, when the throw of the 
dice has appointed him as his country's liberator — 
she rose from her recumbent position, and sitting on 
the edge of her bed turned over the pages of her 
tiny edition of St. Thomas a Kempis. 

It had been long since she had opened this volume. 
Indeed, isolated from contact with any Catholic 
influence except that of the philosophical Mr. Taxater, 



290 WOOD AND STONE 

Lacrima had been recently drifting rather far away 
from the church of her fathers. This complete up- 
heaval of her whole life threw her back upon her old 
faith. 

Like so many other women of suppressed romantic 
emotions, when the moment came for some heroic 
sacrifice for the sake of her friend, she at once threw 
into the troubled waters the consecrated oil that had 
anointed the half-forgotten piety of her childhood. 

One curious and interesting psychological fact in 
connection with this new trend of feeling in her, was 
the fact that the actual realistic horror of being, in 
a literal and material sense, at the mercy of Mr. John 
Goring never presented itself to her mind at all. 
Its very dreadfulness, being a thing that amounted to 
sheer death, blurred and softened its tangible and 
palpable image. 

Yet it must not be supposed that she meditated 
definitely upon any special line of action. She formu- 
lated no plan of self-destruction. For some strange 
reason, it was much less the bodily terror of the 
idea that rose up awful and threatening before her, 
than its spiritual and moral counterpart. 

Had Lacrima been compelled, like poor Sonia in the 
Russian novel, to become a harlot for the sake of 
those she loved, it would have been the mental 
rather than the physical outrage that would have 
weighed upon her. 

She was of that curious human type which sepa- 
rates the body from the soul, in all these things. 
She had always approached life rather through her 
mind than through her senses, and it was in the imag- 
ination that she found both her catastrophes and 



LACRIMA 291 



recoveries. In this particular case, the obsessing image 
of death had for the moment quite obliterated the 
more purely realistic aspect of what she was contem- 
plating. Her feeling may perhaps be best described 
by saying that whenever she imaged the farmer's 
possession of her, it was always as if what he pos- 
sessed was no more than a dead inert corpse, about 
whose fate none, least of all herself, could have any 
further care. 

She had just counted the strokes of the church 
clock striking four, when she heard Gladys' steps in 
the adjoining room. She hurriedly concealed the 
little purple-covered volume, and lay back once more 
upon her pillows. She fervently prayed in her heart 
that Gladys might be ignorant of what had occurred, 
but her knowledge of the relations between father and 
daughter made this a very forlorn hope. 

Such as it was, it was entirely dispelled as soon as 
the fair-haired creature glided in and sat down at 
the foot of her bed. 

Gladys looked at her cousin with intent and luxuri- 
ous interest; her expression being very much what 
one might suppose the countenance of a young pagan 
priestess to have worn, as she gazed, dreamily and 
sweetly, in a pause of the sacrificial procession, at 
some doomed heifer "lowing at the skies, and all her 
silken flanks with garlands dressed." 

"So I hear that you are going to be married," she 
began at once, speaking in a slow, liquid voice, and 
toying indolently with her friend's shoe-strings. 

"Please — please don't talk about it," murmured 
the Italian. "Nothing is settled yet. I would so 
much rather not think of it now." 



292 WOOD AND STONE 

"But, how silly!" cried the other, with a melodious 
little laugh. "Of course we must talk about it. It is 
so extremely exciting! I shall be seeing uncle John 
today and I must congratulate him. I am sure he 
doesn't half know how lucky he is." 

Lacrima jumped up from where she lay and step- 
ping to the window looked out over the sunlit park. 

Gladys rose too, and standing behind her cousin, 
put her arms round her waist. 

"No, I am sure he doesn't realize how sweet you 
are," she whispered. "You darling little thing, — 
you little, shy, frightened thing — you must tell me 
all about it! I'll try not to tease you — I really 
will! What a clever, naughty little girl, it has been, 
peeping and glancing at a poor elderly farmer and 
inflaming his simple heart! But all your friends are 
rather well advanced in age, aren't they, dear? I 
expect uncle John is really no older than Mr. Quincunx 
or James Andersen. What tricks do you use, darling, 
to attract all these people? 

"I'll tell you what it is! It's the way you cla^p 
your fingers, and keep groping with your hands in 
the air in front of you, as if you were blind. I've 
noticed that trick of yours for a long time. I expect 
it attracts them awfully! I expect they all long to 
take those little wrists and hold them tight! And 
the drooping, dragging way you walk, too; that no 
doubt they find quite enthralling. It has often irri- 
tated me, but I can quite see now why you do it. 
It must make them long to support you in their 
strong arms! What a crafty little puss she is! And 
I have sometimes taken her for no better than a 
little simpleton! I see I shall not for long be the 



LACRIMA 293 



only person allowed to kiss our charming La- 
crimal So I must make the best of my opportunities, 
mustn't I?" 

Suiting her action to her words she turned the girl 
towards her with a vigorous movement, and over- 
coming her reluctance, embraced her softly, whisper- 
ing, as she kissed her averted mouth, — 

"Uncle John won't do this half so prettily as I do, 
will he? But oh, how you must have played your 
tricks upon him — cunning, cunning little thing!" 

Lacrima had by this time reached the end of her 
endurance. With a sudden flash of genuine Italian 
anger she flung her cousin back, with such unexpected 
violence, that the elder girl would actually have 
fallen to the floor, if she had not encountered in her 
collapse the arm of the wicker chair which stood 
behind her. 

She rose silent and malignant. 

"So that's what we gentle, wily ones do, is it, 
when we lose our little tempers! All right, my 
friend, all right! I shall remember." 

She walked haughtily to the door that divided their 
rooms. 

"The sooner I am married," she cried, as a final 
hit, "the sooner you will be — and I shall be married 
soon — soon — soon; perhaps before this summer is 
out!" 

Lacrima stood for some moments rigid and un- 
moving. Then there came over her an irresistible 
longing to escape from this house, and flee far off, 
anywhere, anyhow, so long as she could be alone with 
her misery, alone with her tragic resolution. 

The invasion of Gladys had made this resolution 



294 WOOD AND STONE 

a very different thing from what it had seemed an 
hour ago. But she must recover herself! She must 
see things again in the clearer, larger light of sublime 
sacrifice. She must purge the baseness of her cousin's 
sensual magnetism out of her brain and her heart! 

She hurriedly fastened on her hat, took her faded 
parasol, slipped the tiny St. Thomas into her dress, 
and ran down the great oak staircase. She hurried 
past the entrance without turning aside to greet the 
impassive Mrs. Romer, seated as usual in her accus- 
tomed place, and skirting the east lawns emerged 
from the little postern-gate into the park. Crossing 
a half-cut hayfield and responding gravely and gently 
to the friendly greetings of the hay-makers, she 
entered the Yeoborough road just below the steep 
ascent, between high over-shadowing hedges, of Dead 
Man's Lane. 

Whether from her first exit from the house, she 
had intended to follow this path, she could hardly 
herself have told. It was the instinct of a woman at 
bay, seeking out, not the strong that could help her, 
but the weak that she herself could help. It was 
also perhaps the true Pariah impulse, which drives 
these victims of the powerful and the well-constituted, 
to find rehabilitation in the society of one another. 

As she ascended the shadowy lane with its crum- 
bling banks of sandy soil and its over-hanging trees, 
she felt once again how persistently this heavy 
luxuriant landscape dragged her earthwards and 
clogged the wings of her spirit. The tall grasses 
growing thick by the way-side enlaced themselves 
with the elder-bushes and dog-wood, which in their 
turn blended indissolubly with the lower branches 



LACRIMA 295 



of the elms. The lane itself was but a deep shadowy 
path dividing a flowing sea of foliage, which seemed 
to pour, in a tidal wave of suffocating fertility, over 
the whole valley. 

The Italian struggled in vain against the depressing 
influence of all these rank and umbrageous growths, 
spreading out leafy arms to catch her and groping 
towards her with moist adhesive tendrils. The lane 
was full of a warm steamy vapour, like that of a 
hot-house, to the heavy odour of which, every sort 
of verdurous growing thing offered its contribution. 

There was a vague smell of funguses in the air, 
though none were visible; and the idea of them may 
only have been due to the presence of decaying wood 
or the moist drooping stalks of the dead flowers of 
the earlier season. Now and again the girl caught, 
wafted upon a sudden stir of wind, the indescribably 
sweet scent of honey-suckle — a sweetness almost 
overpowering in its penetrating voluptuous approach. 
Once, high up above her head, she saw a spray of this 
fragrant parasite; not golden yellow, as it is where 
the sun shines full upon it, but pallid and ivory-white. 
In a curious way it seemed as if this Nevilton scenery 
offered her no escape from the insidious sensuality 
she fled. 

The indolent luxuriousness of Gladys seemed to 
breathe from every mossy spore and to over-hang 
every unclosing frond. And if Gladys was in the 
leaves and grass, the remoter terror of Mr. Goring 
was in the earth and clay. Between the two they 
monopolized this whole corner of the planet, and 
made everything between zenith and nadir their 
privileged pasture. 



296 WOOD AND STONE 

As she drew nearer to where Mr. Quincunx lived, 
her burdened mind sought relief in focussing itself 
upon him. She would be sure to find him in his 
garden. That she knew, because the day was Satur- 
day. Should she tell him what had happened to her? 

Ah! that was indeed the crucial question! Was it 
necessary that she should sacrifice herself for him 
without his even knowing what she did? 

But he would have to know, sooner or later, of 
this marriage. Everyone would be talking of it. It 
would be bound to come to his ears. 

And what would he think of her if she said nothing? 
What would he think of her, in any case, having 
accepted such a degradation? 

Not to tell him at all, would throw a completely 
false light upon the whole transaction. It would make 
her appear treacherous, fickle, worldly-minded, shame- 
less — wickedly false to her unwritten covenant with 
himself. 

To tell him, without giving him the true motive of 
her sacrifice, would be, she felt sure, to bring down 
his bitterest reproaches on her head. 

For a passing second she felt a wave of indignation 
against him surge up in her heart. This, however, 
she passionately suppressed, with the instinctive de- 
sire of a woman who is sacrificing herself to feel the 
object of such sacrifice worthy of what is offered. 

It was not long before she reached the gate of Mr. 
Quincunx's garden. Yes, — there he was — with his 
wheel-barrow and his hoe — bending over his pota- 
toes. She opened the gate and walked quite close 
up to him before he observed her. He greeted her in 
his usual manner, with a smile of half-cynical, half- 



LACRIMA 297 



affectionate welcome, and taking her by the hand 
as he might have taken a child, he led her to the 
one shady spot in his garden, where, under a weeping 
ash, he had constructed a rough bench. 

"I didn't expect you," he said, when they were 
seated. "I never do expect you. People like me who 
have only Saturday afternoons to enjoy themselves 
in don't expect visitors. They count the hours 
which are left to them before the night comes." 

"But you have Sunday, my friend," she said, lay- 
ing her hand upon his. 

"Sunday!" Mr. Quincunx muttered. "Do you call 
Sunday a day? I regard Sunday as a sort of prison- 
exercise, when all the convicts go walking up and 
down and showing off their best clothes. I can neither 
work nor read nor think on Sunday. I have to put on 
my best clothes like the rest, and stand at my gate, 
staring at the weather and wondering what the 
hay-crop will be. The only interesting moments I 
have on Sunday are when that silly-faced Wone, or 
one of the Andersens, drifts this way, and we lean 
over my wall and abuse the gentry." 

"Poor dear!" said the girl pityingly. "I expect 
the real truth is that you are so tired with your work 
all the week, that you are glad enough to rest and 
do nothing." 

Mr. Quincunx's nostrils dilated, and his drooping 
moustache quivered. A smile of delicious and sar- 
donic humour wavered over the lower portion of his 
face, while his grey eyes lost their sadness and 
gleamed with a goblin-like merriment. 

"I am getting quite popular at the office," he said. 
"I have learnt the secret of it now." 



298 WOOD AND STONE 

"And what is the secret?" asked Lacrima, sup- 
pressing a queer little gasp in her throat. 

"Sucking up," Mr. Quincunx answered, his face 
flickering with subterranean amusement, "sucking up 
to everyone in the place, from the manager to the 
office boy." 

Lacrima returned to him a very wan little smile. 

"I suppose you mean ingratiating yourself," she 
said; "you English have such funny expressions." 

"Yes, ingratiating myself, pandering to them, flat- 
tering them, agreeing with them, anticipating their 
wishes, doing their work for them, telling lies for 
them, abusing God to make them laugh, introducing 
them to Guy de Maupassant, and even making a 
few light references, now and again, to what Shake- 
speare calls 'country-matters.'" 

"I don't believe a word you say," protested Lacrima 
in rather a quavering voice. "I believe you hate them 
all and that they are all unkind to you. But I can quite 
imagine you have to do more work than your own." 

Mr. Quincunx's countenance lost its merriment 
instantaneously. 

"I believe you are as annoyed as Mr. Romer," he 
said, "that I should get on in the office. But I am 
past being affected by that. I know what human 
nature is! We are all really pleased when other 
people get on badly, and are sorry when they do 
well." 

Lacrima felt as though the trees in the field oppo- 
site had suddenly reversed themselves and were 
waving their roots in the air. 

She gave a little shiver and pressed her hand to 
her side. 



LACRIMA 299 



Mr. Quincunx continued. 

"Of course you don't like it when I tell you the 
truth. Nobody likes to hear the truth. Human 
beings lap up lies as pigs lap up milk. And women 
are worst of all in that! No woman really can love 
a person — not, at any rate, for long — who tells 
her the truth! That is why women love clergymen, 
because clergymen are brought up to lie. I saw you 
laughing and amusing yourself the other evening with 
Mr. Clavering — you and your friend Gladys. I 
went the other way, so as not to interrupt such a 
merry conversation." 

Lacrima turned upon him at this. 

"I cannot understand how you can say such things 
of me!" she cried. "It is too much. I won't — I 
won't listen to it!" 

Her over-strained nerves broke down at last, and 
covering her face with her hands, she burst into a fit 
of convulsive sobs. 

Mr. Quincunx rose and stood gazing at her, 
gloomily plucking at his beard. 

"And such are women!" he thought to himself. 
"One can never tell them the least truth but they 
burst into tears." 

He waited thus in silence for one or two moments, 
and then an expression of exquisite tenderness and 
sympathy came into his face. His patient grey eyes 
looked at her bowed head with the look of a sorrow- 
ful god. Gently he sat down beside her and laid his 
hand on her shoulder. 

"Lacrima — dear — I am sorry — I oughtn't to 
have said that. I didn't mean it. On my solemn 
oath I didn't mean it! Lacrima, please don't cry. I 



300 WOOD AND STONE 

can't bear it when you cry. It was all absolute non- 
sense what I said just now. It is the devil that 
gets into me and makes me say those things! 
Lacrima — darling Lacrima — we won't tease one 
another any more." 

Her sobs diminished under the obvious sincerity 
of his words. She lifted up a tear-stained face and 
threw her arms passionately round his neck. 

"I've no one but you," she cried, "no one, no one!" 

For several minutes they embraced each other in 
silence — the girl's breast quivering with the after- 
sighs of her emotion and their tears mingling together 
and falling on Mr. Quincunx's beard. Had Gladys 
Romer beheld them at that moment she would cer- 
tainly have been strengthened in her healthy-minded 
mocking contempt for sentimental "slobbering." 

When they had resumed a more normal mood their 
conversation continued gently and quietly. 

"Of course you are right," said Mr. Quincunx. "I 
am not really happy at the office. Who could be 
happy in a place of that kind? But it is my life — 
and one has to do what one can with one's life! I 
have to pretend to myself that they like me there, and 
that I am making myself useful — otherwise I simply 
could not go on. I have to pretend. That's what 
it is! It is my pet illusion, my little fairy-story. It 
was that that made me get angry with you — that and 
the devil. One doesn't like to have one's fairy-stories 
broken into by the brutal truth." 

"Poor dear!" said Lacrima softly, stroking his 
hand with a gesture of maternal tenderness. 

"If there was any hope of this wretched business 
coming to an end," Maurice went on, "it would be 



LACRIMA 301 



different. Then I would curse all these people to 
hell and have done with it. But what can I do? 
I am already past middle age. I shouldn't be able 
to get anything else if I gave it up. And I don't 
want to leave Nevilton while you are here." 

The girl looked intently at him. Then she folded 
her hands on her lap and began gravely. 

"I have something to tell you, Maurice dear. 
Something very important. What would you say if 
I told you that it was in my power to set you free 
from all this and make you happy and comfortable 
for the rest of your life?" 

An invisible watcher from some more clairvoyant 
planet than ours would have been interested at that 
moment in reading the double weakness of two poor 
Pariah hearts. Lacrima, brought back from the half- 
insane attitudes of her heroic resolution by the inter- 
mission of natural human emotion, found herself on 
the brink of half-hoping that her friend would com- 
pletely and indignantly refuse this shameful sacrifice. 

"Surely," her heart whispered, "some other path of 
escape must offer itself for them both. Perhaps, 
after all, Vennie Seldom might discover some way." 

Mr. Quincunx, on the other hand, was most thor- 
oughly alarmed by her opening words. He feared 
that she was going to propose some desperate scheme 
by which, fleeing from Nevilton together, she was to 
help him earn money enough for their mutual support. 

"What should I say?" he answered aloud, to the 
girl's question. "It would depend upon the manner 
in which you worked this wonderful miracle. But I 
warn you I am not hopeful. Things might be worse. 
After all I have a house to return to. I have food. 



302 WOOD AND STONE 

I have my books. I have you to come and pay me 
visits. I have my garden. In this world, when a 
person has a roof over his head, and someone to talk 
to every other day, he had better remain still and 
not attract the attention of the gods." 

Silence followed his words. Instead of speaking, 
Lacrima took off her hat, and smoothed her hair 
away from her forehead, keeping her eyes fixed upon 
the ground. An immense temptation seized her to 
let the moment pass without revealing her secret. 
She could easily substitute any imaginary suggestion 
in place of the terrible reality. Her friend's morbid 
nerves would help her deception. The matter would 
be glossed over and be as if it had never been: be, in 
fact, no more than it was, a hideous nightmare of 
her own insane and diseased conscience. 

But could the thing be so suppressed? Would it 
be like Nevilton to let even the possible image of 
such a drama pass unsnatched at by voluble tongues, 
unenlarged upon by malicious gossip? 

He would be bound to hear of Mr. Goring's offer. 
That, at least, could not be concealed. And what 
assurance had she that Mr. Romer would not himself 
communicate to him the full nature of the hideous 
bargain? The quarry-owner might think it diplo- 
matic to trade upon Maurice's weakness. 

No — there was no help for it. She must tell him; 
— only praying now, in the profound depths of her 
poor heart, that he would not consider such an infamy 
even for a second. So she told him the whole story, 
in a low monotonous voice, keeping her head lowered 
and watching the progress of a minute snail labori- 
ously ascending a stalk of grass. 



LACRIMA 303 



Maurice Quincunx had never twiddled the point of 
his Elizabethan beard with more detached absorption 
than while listening to this astounding narration. 
When she had quite finished, he regarded her from 
head to foot with a very curious expression. 

The girl breathed hard. What was he thinking? 
He did not at once, in a burst of righteous indigna- 
tion, fling the monstrous suggestion to the winds. 
What was he thinking? As a matter of fact the 
thoughts of Mr. Quincunx had taken an extraor- 
dinary turn. 

Being in his personal relation to feminine charm, 
of a somewhat cold temper, he had never, for all his 
imaginative sentiment towards his little friend, been 
at all swayed by any violent sensuous attraction. 
But the idea of such attraction having seized so 
strongly upon another person reacted upon him, and 
he looked at her, perhaps for the first time since 
they had met, with eyes of something more than 
purely sentimental regard. 

This new element in his attitude towards her did 
not, however, issue in any excess of physical jealousy. 
What it did lead to, unluckily for Lacrima, was a 
certain queer diminution of his ideal respect for her 
personality. In place of focussing his attention upon 
the sublime sacrifice she contemplated for his sake, the 
events she narrated concentrated his mind upon the 
mere brutal and accidental fact that Mr. Goring 
had so desperately desired her. The mere fact of 
her having been so desired by such a man, changed 
her in his eyes. His cynical distrust of all women 
led him to conceive the monstrous and grotesque idea 
that she must in her heart be gratified by having 






304 WOOD AND STONE 

aroused this passion in the farmer. It did not carry 
him quite so far as to make him believe that she had 
consciously excited such emotion; but it led him to 
the very brink of that outrageous fantasy. Had 
Lacrima come to him with a shame-faced confession 
that she had let herself be seduced by the Priory- 
tenant he could hardly have gazed at her with more 
changed and troubled eyes. He felt the same curious 
mixture of sorrowful pity and remote unlawful attrac- 
tion to the object of his pity, that he would have 
felt in a casual conversation with some luckless child 
of the streets. By being the occasion of Mr. Goring's 
passion, she became for him no less than such an 
unfortunate; the purer sentiment he had hitherto 
cherished changing into quite a different mood. 

He lifted her up by the wrists and pressed her 
closely to him, kissing her again and again. The 
girl's heart went on anxiously beating. She could 
hardly restrain her impatience for him to speak. 
Why did he not speak? 

Disentangling herself from his embrace with a quick 
feminine instinct that something was wrong, she 
pulled him down upon the bench by her side and 
taking his hand in hers looked with pitiful bewilder- 
ment into his face. 

"So when this thing happens," she said, "all your 
troubles will be over. You will be free forever from 
that horrid office." 

"And you," said Mr. Quincunx — his mood chan- 
ging again, and his goblin-like smile twitching his 
nostrils, — "You will be the mistress of the Priory. 
Well! I suppose you will not desert me altogether 
when that happens!" 



LACRIMA 305 



So that was the tone he adopted! He could afford 
to turn the thing into a jest — into God knows what! 
She let his hand drop and stared into empty space, 
seeing nothing, hearing nothing, understanding nothing. 

This time Maurice realized that he had disappointed 
her; that his cynicism had carried him too far. Un- 
fortunately the same instinct that told him he had 
made a fool of himself pushed him on to seek an 
issue from the situation by wading still further into it. 

"Come — come," he said. "You and I must face 
this matter like people who are really free spirits, 
and not slaves to any ridiculous superstition. It is 
noble, it is sweet of you to think of marrying that 
brute so as to set me free. Of course if I was free, 
and you were up at the Priory, we should see a great 
deal more of each other than we do now. I could 
take one of those vacant cottages close to the church. 

"Don't think — Lacrima dear," he went on, pos- 
sessing himself of one of her cold hands and trying to 
recall her attention, "don't think that I don't realize 
what it is to you to have to submit to such a fright- 
ful thing. Of course we know how outrageous it is 
that such a marriage should be forced on you. But, 
after all, you and I are above these absurd popular 
superstitions about all these things. Every girl 
sooner or later hates the man she marries. It is 
human nature to hate the people we have to live 
with; and when it comes down to actual reality, all 
human beings are much the same. If you were 
forced to marry me, you would probably hate me 
just as much as you'll hate this poor devil. After 
all, what is this business of being married to people 
and bearing them children? It doesn't touch your 



306 WOOD AND STONE 

mind. It doesn't affect your soul. As old Marcus 
Aurelius says, our bodies are nothing! They are 
wretched corpses, anyway, dragged hither and thither 
by our imprisoned souls. It is these damned clergy- 
men, with their lies about 'sin' and so forth, that 
upset women's minds. For you to be married to 
a man you hate, would only be like my having 
to go to this Yeoborough office with people I 
hate. You will always have, as that honest fellow 
Epictetus says, your own soul to retire into, what- 
ever happens. Heavens! it strikes me as a bit of 
humorous revenge," — here his nostrils twitched again 
and the hobgoblin look reappeared — "this thought 
of you and me living peacefully at our ease, so near 
one another, and at these confounded rascals' 
expense!" 

Lacrima staggered to her feet. "Let me go," she 
said. "I want to go back — away — anywhere." 

Her look, her gesture, her broken words gave Mr. 
Quincunx a poignant shock. In one sudden illumi- 
nating flash he saw himself as he was, and his recent 
remarks in their true light. We all have sometimes 
these psychic search-light flashes of introspection; 
but the more healthy-minded and well-balanced 
among us know how to keep them in their place and 
how to expel them promptly and effectively. 

Mr. Quincunx was not healthy-minded. He had 
the morbid sensitive mind of a neurotic Pariah. 
Hence, in place of suppressing this spiritual illumina- 
tion, he allowed it to irradiate the gloomiest caverns 
of his being. He rose with a look of abject and 
miserable concern. 

"Stop," he cried huskily. 



LACRIMA 307 



She looked at him wondering, the blood returning 
a little to her cheeks. 

"It is the Devil!" he exclaimed. "I must have 
the Devil in me, to say such things and to treat you 
like this. You are the bravest, sweetest girl in the 
world, and I am a brutal idiot — worse than Mr. 
Romer!" 

He struck himself several blows upon the forehead, 
knocking off his hat. Lacrima could not help noticing 
that in place of the usual protection, some small 
rhubarb-leaves ornamented the interior of this 
appendage. 

She smiled at him, through a rain of happy tears, — 
the first smile that day had seen upon her face. 

"We are both of us absurd people, I suppose," 
she said, laying her hands upon his shoulders. "We 
ought to have some friend with a clear solid head to 
keep us straight." 

Mr. Quincunx kissed her on the forehead and 
stooped down for his hat. 

"Yes," he said. "We are a queer pair. I suppose 
we are really both a little mad. I wish there was 
someone we could go to." 

"Couldn't you — perhaps — " said Lacrima, "say 
something to Mrs. Seldom? And yet I would much 
rather she didn't know. I would much rather no 
one knew!" 

"I might," murmured Maurice thoughtfully; "I 
might tell her. But the unlucky thing is, she is so 
narrow-minded that she can't separate you in her 
thoughts from those frightful people." 

"Shall I try Vennie?" whispered the girl, "or shall 
we — " here she looked him boldly in the face with 



308 WOOD AND STONE 

eager, brightening eyes — "shall we run away to 
London, and be married, and risk the future?" 

Poor little Italian! She had never made a greater 
tactical blunder than when she uttered these words. 
Maurice Quincunx's mystic illumination had made 
it possible for him to exorcise his evil spirit. It 
could not put into his nature an energy he had not 
been born with. His countenance clouded. 

"You don't know what you're saying," he re- 
marked. "You don't know what a sour-tempered 
devil I am, and how I am sure to make any girl 
who lives with me miserable. You would hate me 
in a month more than you hate Mr. Romer, and in 
a year I should have either worried you into your 
grave or you would have run away from me. No — 
no — no ! I should be a criminal fool to let you 
subject yourself to such a risk as that." 

"But," pleaded the girl, with flushed cheeks, "we 
should be sure to find something! I could teach 
Italian, — and you could — oh, I am sure there are 
endless things you could do! Please, please, Maurice 
dear, let us go. Anything is better than this misery. 
I have got quite enough money for the journey. 
Look!" 

She pulled out from beneath her dress a little 
chain purse, that hung, by a small silver chain, round 
her slender neck. She opened it and shook three 
sovereigns into the palm of her hand. "Enough for 
the journey," she said, "and enough to keep us for 
a week if we are economical. We should be sure to 
find something by that time." 

Mr. Quincunx shook his head. It was an ironical 
piece of psychic malice that the very illumination 



LACRIMA 309 



which had made him remorseful and sympathetic 
should have also reduced to the old level of tender 
sentiment the momentary passion he had felt. It 
was the absence in him of this sensual impulse which 
made the scheme she proposed seem so impossible. 
Had he been of a more animal nature, or had she 
possessed the power of arousing his senses to a more 
violent craving, instead of brooding, as he did, upon 
the mere material difficulties of such a plan, he would 
have plunged desperately into it and carried her off 
without further argument. The very purity of his 
temperament was her worst enemy. 

Poor Lacrimal Her hands dropped once more 
helplessly to her side, and the old hopeless depression 
began to invade her heart. It seemed impossible to 
make her friend realize that if she refused the farmer 
and things went on as before, her position in Mr. 
Romer's establishment would become more impossible 
than ever. What — for instance — would become of 
her when this long-discussed marriage of Gladys with 
young Ilminster took place? Could she conceive 
herself going on living under that roof, with Mr. 
Romer continually harassing her, and his brother- 
in-law haunting every field she wandered into? 

"It was noble of you," began her bearded friend 
again, resuming his work at the weeds, while she, as 
on a former occasion, leant against his wheel-bar- 
row, "to think of enduring this wretched marriage 
for my sake. But I cannot let you do it. I should 
not be happy in letting you do it. I have some 
conscience — though you may not think so — and 
it would worry me to feel you were putting up with 
that fool's companionship just to make me com- 



310 WOOD AND STONE 

fortable. It would spoil my enjoyment of my free- 
dom, to know that you were not equally free. Of 
course it would be paradise to me to have the money 
you speak of. I should be able to live exactly as I 
like, and these damned villagers would treat me with 
proper respect then. But I couldn't do it. I couldn't 
take my pleasure at the expense of such a strain on 
you. It would spoil everything! 

"I don't deny, however," he went on, evidently 
deriving more and more virtuous satisfaction from 
his somewhat indecisive rejection of her sacrifice, 
"that it is a temptation to me. I hate that office so 
profoundly! You were quite right there, Lacrima. 
All I said about getting on with those people was 
damned bluff. I loathe them and they loathe me. 
It is simply like a kind of death, my life in that 
place. Yes, what you suggest is a temptation to me. 
I can't help feeling rather like that poor brother of 
the girl in 'Measure for Measure' when she comes to 
say that she could save his life by the loss of her 
virtue, and he talks about his feelings on the subject 
of death. She put him down fiercely enough, poor 
dog! She evidently thought her virtue was much 
more important than his life. I am glad you are 
just the opposite of that puritanical young woman. 
I shouldn't like you very much if you took her line! 

"But just because you don't do that, my dear," 
Mr. Quincunx went on, tugging at the obstinate 
roots of a great dock, "I couldn't think of letting 
you sacrifice yourself. If you icere like that woman 
in the play, and made all that damned silly fuss about 
your confounded virtue, I should be inclined to wish 
that Mr. Goring had got his hands upon you. Women 



LACRIMA 311 



who think as much of themselves as that, ought to be 
given over to honest fellows like Mr. Goring. It's the 
sort of punishment they deserve for their superstitious 
selfishness. For it's all selfishness, of course. We 
know that well enough!" 

He flung the defeated weed so vindictively upon his 
barrow that some of the earth from its roots was 
sprinkled into Lacrima's lap. He came to help her 
brush it away, and took the opportunity to kiss her 
again, — this time a shade more amorously. 

"All this business of 'love,'" he went on, returning 
to his potatoes, "is nothing but the old eternal 
wickedness of man's nature. The only kind of love 
which is worth anything is the love that gets rid of 
sex altogether, and becomes calm and quiet and 
distant — like the love of a planetary spirit. Apart 
from this love, which is not like human love at all, 
everything in us is selfish. Even a mother's care for 
its child is selfish." 

"I shall never have a child," said Lacrima in a 
low voice. 

"I wonder what your friend James Andersen would 
say to all this," continued Mr. Quincunx. "Why, by 
the way, don't you get him to marry you? He would 
do it, no doubt, like a shot, if you gave him a little 
encouragement; and then make you work all day in 
his kitchen, as his father made his mother, so they 
say." 

Lacrima made a hopeless gesture, and looked at 
the watch upon her wrist. She began to feel dizzy 
and sick for want of food. She had had nothing 
since breakfast, and the shadows were beginning to 
grow long. 



312 WOOD AND STONE 

"I know what Luke Andersen would say if we asked 
him," added Mr. Quincunx. "He would advise you 
to marry this damned farmer, wheedle his money 
out of him, and then sheer off with some fine youth 
and never see Nevilton again! Luke Andersen's the 
fellow for giving a person advice in these little 
matters. He has a head upon his shoulders, that 
boy! I tell you what it is, my dear, your precious 
Miss Gladys had better be careful! She'll be getting 
herself into trouble with that honest youth if she 
doesn't look out. I know him. He cares for no mor- 
tal soul in the world, or above the world. He's a 
master in the art of life! We are all infants compared 
with him. If you do need anyone to help you, or 
to help me either, I tell you Luke Andersen's the 
one to go to. He has more influence in this village 
than any living person except Romer himself, and I 
should be sorry for Romer if his selfishness clashed 
with the selfishness of that young Machiavel!" 

"Do you mind," said Lacrima suddenly, "if I go 
into your kitchen and make myself a cup of tea? 
I feel rather exhausted. I expect it is the heat." 

Mr. Quincunx looked intently at her, leaning upon 
his hoe. He had only once before — on an excep- 
tionally cold winter's day — allowed the girl to enter 
the cottage. 

He had a vague feeling that if he did so he would 
in some way commit himself, and be betrayed into 
a false position. He almost felt as though, if she 
were once comfortably established there, he would 
never be able to get her out again! He was nervous, 
too, about her seeing all his little household pecul- 
iarities. If she saw, for instance, how cheaply, how 



LACRIMA 313 



very cheaply, he managed to live, eating no meat 
and economizing in sugar and butter, she might be 
encouraged still further in her attempts to persuade 
him to run away. 

He was also strangely reluctant that she should 
get upon the track of his queer little lonely epicurean 
pleasures, such as his carefully guarded bottle of 
Scotch whiskey; his favourite shelf of mystical and 
Rabelaisian books; his jar of tobacco, with a piece 
of bread under its lid, to keep the contents moist 
and cool; his elaborate arrangements for holding 
draughts out; his polished pewter; his dainty writing- 
desk with its piled-up, vellum-bound journals, all 
labelled and laid in order; his queer-coloured oriental 
slippers; his array of scrupulously scrubbed pots and 
pans. Mr. Quincunx was extremely unwilling that 
his lady-love should poke her pretty fingers into all 
these mysteries. 

What he liked, was to live in two distinct worlds: 
his world of sentiment with Lacrima as its solitary 
centre, and his world of sacramental epicurism with 
his kitchen-fire as its solitary centre. He was ex- 
tremely unwilling that the several circumferences of 
these centres should intersect one another. Both 
were equally necessary to him. When days passed 
without a visit from his friend he became miserably 
depressed. But he saw no reason for any inartistic 
attempt to unite these two spheres of interest. A 
psychologist who defined Mr. Quincunx's temper as 
the temper of a hermit would have been far astray. 
He was profoundly dependent on human sympathy. 
But he liked human sympathy that kept its place. 
He did not like human society. Perhaps of all well- 



314 WOOD AND STONE 

known psychological types, the type of the phi- 
losopher Rousseau was the one to which he most 
nearly approximated. And yet, had he possessed 
children, Mr. Quincunx would certainly never have 
been persuaded to leave them at the foundling 
hospital. He would have lived apart from them, 
but he would never have parted with them. He was 
really a domestic sentimentalist, who loved the ex- 
quisite sensation of being alone with his own 
thoughts. 

With all this in mind, one need feel no particular 
surprise that the response he gave to Lacrima's 
sudden request was a somewhat reluctant one. How- 
ever, he did respond; and opening the cottage-doors 
for her, ushered her into the kitchen and put the 
kettle on the fire. 

It puzzled him a little that she should feel no em- 
barrassment at being alone with him in this secluded 
place ! In the depths of his heart — like many 
philosophers — Mr. Quincunx, in spite of his anar- 
chistic theories, possessed no slight vein of conven- 
tional timidity. He did not realize this in the least. 
Women, according to his cynical code, were the sole 
props of conventionality. Without women, there 
would be no such thing in the world. But now, 
brought face to face with the reckless detachment of 
a woman fighting for her living soul, he felt confused, 
uncomfortable, and disconcerted. 

Lacrima waited in patient passivity, too exhausted 
to make any further mental or moral effort, while 
her friend made the tea and cut the bread-and-butter. 

As soon as she had partaken of these things, her 
exhaustion gave place to a delicious sense — the first 



LACRIMA 315 



she had known for many weeks — of peaceful and 
happy security. She put far away, into the remote 
background of her mind, all melancholy and tragic 
thoughts, and gave herself up to the peacefulness of 
the moment. The hands of Mr. Quincunx's clock 
pointed to half-past six. She had therefore a clear 
thirty minutes left, before she need set out on her 
return walk, in order to have time to dress for dinner. 

"I wonder if your Miss Gladys," remarked La- 
crima's host, lighting a cigarette as he sipped his 
tea, "will marry the Honourable Mr. Uminster after 
all, or whistle him down the wind, and make up to 
our American friend? I notice that Dangelis is 
already considerably absorbed in her." 

"Please, dear, don't let us talk any more about 
these people," begged Lacrima softly. "Let me be 
happy for a little while." 

Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard. "You are a 
queer little girl," he said. "But what I should do 
if the gods took you away from me I have not the 
least idea. I should not care then whether I worked 
in an office or in a factory. I should not care what 
I did." 

The girl jumped up impulsively from her seat and 
went over to him. Mr. Quincunx took her upon his 
knees as he might have taken a child and fondled her 
gravely and gently. The smoke of his cigarette 
ascended in a thin blue column above their two 
heads. 

At that moment there was a mocking laugh at the 
window. Lacrima slid out of his arms and they both 
rose to their feet and turned indignantly. 

The laughing face of Gladys Romer peered in 



316 WOOD AND STONE 

upon them, her eyes shining with delighted malevo- 
lence. "I saw you," she cried. "But you needn't 
look so cross! I like to see these things. I have been 
watching you for quite a long time! It has been such 
fun! I only hoped I could keep quiet for longer still, 
till one of you began to cry, or something. But you 
looked so funny that I couldn't help laughing. And 
that spoilt it all. Mr. Dangelis is at the gate. 
Shall I call him up? He came with me across the 
park. He tried to stop me from pouncing on you, 
but I wouldn't listen to him. He said it was a 'low- 
down stunt.' You know the way he talks, Lacrimal " 

The two friends stood staring at the intruder in 
petrified horror. Then without a word they quickly 
issued from the cottage and crossed the garden, 
Neither of them spoke to Gladys; and Mr. Quincunx 
immdiately returned to his house as soon as he saw 
the American advance to greet Lacrima with his 
usual friendly nonchalance. 

The three went off down the lane together; and the 
poor philosopher, staring disconsolately at the empty 
tea-cups of his profaned sanctuary, cursed himself, 
his friend, his fate, and the Powers that had ap- 
pointed that fate from the beginning of the world. 



CHAPTER XIV 

UNDER-CURRENTS 

JUNE was drawing to an end, and the days, 
though still free from rain, grew less and less 
bright. A thin veil of greyish vapour, which 
never became thick enough or sank low enough to 
resolve itself into definite clouds, offered a perpetual 
hindrance to the shining of the sun. The sun was 
present. Its influence was felt in the warmth of the 
air; but when it became visible, it was only in the 
form of a large misty disc, at which the weakest 
eyes might gaze without distress or discomfort. 

On a certain evening when this vaporous obscurity 
made it impossible to ascertain the exact moment of 
the sun's descent and when it might be said that 
afternoon became twilight before men or cattle real- 
ized that the day was over, Mr. Wone was assisting 
his son Philip in planting geraniums in his back 
garden. 

The Wone house was neither a cottage nor a villa. 
It was one of those nondescript and modest residences, 
which, erected in the mid-epoch of Victoria's reign, 
when money was circulating freely among the middle- 
classes, win a kind of gentle secondary mellowness 
in the twentieth century by reason of something 
solid and liberal in their original construction. It 
stood at the corner of the upper end of Nevilton, 
where, beyond the fountain-square, the road from 



318 WOOD AND STONE 

Yeoborough takes a certain angular turn to the north. 
The garden at the back of it, as with many of the 
cottages of the place, was larger than might have 
been expected, and over the low hedge which sepa- 
rated it from the meadows behind, the long ridge of 
wooded upland, with its emphatic lines of tall Scotch 
firs that made the southern boundary of the valley, 
was pleasantly and reassuringly visible. 

Philip Wone worked in Yeoborough. He was a 
kind of junior partner in a small local firm of tomb- 
stone makers — the very firm, in fact, which under 
the direction of the famous Gideon, had constructed 
the most remarkable monument in Nevilton church- 
yard. It was doubtful whether he would ever attain 
the position of full partner in this concern, for his 
manner of life was eccentric, and neither his ways nor 
his appearance were those of a youth who succeeds 
in business. He was a tall pallid creature. His dark 
coarse hair fell in a heavy wave over his white fore- 
head, and his hands were thin and delicate as the 
hands of an invalid. 

He was an omnivorous reader and made incessant 
use of every subscription library that Yeoborough 
offered. His reading was of two kinds. He read 
romantic novels of every sort — good, bad, and indif- 
ferent — and he read the history of revolutions. 
There can hardly have been, in any portion of the 
earth's surface, a revolution with whose characters 
and incidents Philip was unacquainted. His chief 
passion was for the great French Revolution, the 
personalities of which were more real to him than 
the majority of his own friends. 

Philip was by temperament and conviction an 



UNDER-CURRENTS 319 

ardent anarchist; not an anarchist of Mr. Quincunx's 
mild and speculative type, but of a much more 
formidable brand. He had also long ago consigned 
the idea of any Providential interference with the 
sequence of events upon earth, into the limbo of 
outworn superstitions. 

It was Philip's notion, this, of planting geraniums 
in the back-garden. Dressed nearly always in black, 
and wearing a crimson tie, it was his one luxurious 
sensuality to place in his button-hole, as long as 
they were possibly available, some specimen or other 
of the geranium tribe, with a preference for the most 
flaming varieties. 

The Christian Candidate regarded his son with a 
mixture of contempt and apprehension. He despised 
his lack of business ability, and he viewed his intel- 
lectual opinions as the wilful caprices of a sulky and 
disagreeable temper. 

It was as a sort of pitying concession to the whim 
of a lunatic that Mr. Wone was now assisting Philip 
in planting these absurd geraniums. His own idea 
was that flower-gardens ought to be abolished alto- 
gether. He associated them with gentility and tory- 
ism and private property in land. Under the regime 
he would have liked to have established, all decent 
householders would have had liberal small holdings, 
where they would grow nothing but vegetables. Mr. 
Wone liked vegetables and ate of them very freely in 
their season. Flowers he regarded as the invention 
of the upper classes, so that their privately owned 
world might be decorated with exclusive festoons. 

"I shall go round presently," he said to his son, 
"and visit all these people. I see no reason why 



320 WOOD AND STONE 

Taxater and Clavering, as well as the two Ander- 
sens, should not make themselves of considerable use 
to me. I am tired of talking to these Leo's Hill 
labourers. One day they will strike, and the next 
they won't. All they think of is their own quarrel 
with Lickwit. They have no thought of the general 
interest of the country." 

"No thought of your interests, you mean," put in 
the son. 

"With these others it is different," went on Mr. 
Wone, oblivious of the interruption. "It would be 
a real help to me if the more educated people of the 
place came out definitely on my side. They ought 
to do it. They know what this Romer is. They are 
thinking men. They must see that what the country 
wants is a real representative of the people." 

"What the country wants is a little more honesty 
and a little less hypocrisy," remarked the son. 

"It is abominable, this suppression of our Social 
Meeting. You have heard about that, I suppose?" 
pursued the candidate. 

"Putting an end to your appeals to Providence, 
eh?" said Philip, pressing the earth down round the 
roots of a brilliant flower. 

"I forbid you to talk like that," cried his father. 
"I might at least expect that you would do some- 
thing for me. You have done nothing, since my 
campaign opened, but make these silly remarks." 

"Why don't you pray about it?" jeered the irre- 
pressible young man. "Mr Romer has not suppressed 
prayer, has he, as well as Political Prayer-Meetings?" 

"They were not political!" protested the aggrieved 
parent. "They were profoundly religious. What 



UNDER-CURRENTS 321 

you young people do not seem to realize now-a-days 
is that the soul of this country is still God-fearing 
and religious-minded. I should myself have no hope 
at all for the success of this election, if I were not 
sure that God was intending to make His hand felt." 

"Why don't you canvass God, then?" muttered 
the profane boy. 

"I cannot allow you to talk to me in this way, 
Philip!" cried Mr. Wone, flinging down his trowel. 
"You know perfectly well that you believe as firmly 
as I do, in your heart. It is only that you think it 
impressive and original to make these silly jokes." 

"Thank you, father," replied Philip. "You cer- 
tainly remove my doubts with an invincible argu- 
ment! But I assure you I am quite serious. Nobody 
with any brain believes in God in these days. God 
died about the same time as Mr. Gladstone." 

The Christian Candidate lost his temper. "I must 
beg you," he said, "to keep your infidel nonsense to 
yourself. Your mother and I are sick of it! You 
had better stay in Yeoborough, and not come home 
at all, if you can't behave like an ordinary person 
and keep a civil tongue." 

Philip made no answer to this ultimatum, but 
smiled sardonically and went on planting geraniums. 

But his father was loath to let the matter drop. 

"What would the state of the country be like, I 
wonder," he continued, "if people lost their faith in 
the love of a merciful Father? It is only because we 
feel, in spite of all appearances, the love of God must 
triumph in the end, that we can go on with our great 
movement. The love of God, young man, whatever 
you foolish infidels may say, is at the bottom of all 



322 WOOD AND STONE 

attempts to raise the people to better things. Do you 
think I would labour as I do in this excellent cause 
if I did not feel that I had the loving power of a 
great Heavenly Father behind me? Why do I trouble 
myself with politics? Because His love constrains 
me. Why have I brought you up so carefully — 
though to little profit it seems ! — and have been so 
considerate to your mother — who, as you know, 
isn't always very cheerful? Because His love con- 
strains me. Without the knowledge that His love 
is at the bottom of everything that happens, do you 
think I could endure to live at all?" 

Philip Wone lifted up his head from the flower- 
border. 

"Let me just tell you this, father, it is not the 
love of God, or of anyone else, that's at the bottom 
of our grotesque world. There is nothing at the 
bottom ! The world goes back — without limit or 
boundary — upwards and downwards, and every- 
where. It has no bottom, and no top either! It is 
all quite mad and we are all quite mad. Love? Who 
knows anything of love, except lovers and madmen? 
If these Romers and Lickwits are to be crushed, 
they must be crushed by force. By force, I tell 
you! This love of an imaginary Heavenly Father has 
never done anything for the revolution and never 
will!" 

Mr. Wone, catching at a verbal triumph, regained 
his placable equanimity. 

"Because, dear boy," he remarked, "it is not 
revolution that we want, but reconstruction. Force 
may destroy. It is only love that can rebuild." 

No words can describe the self-satisfied unction 



UNDER-CURRENTS 323 

with which the Christian Candidate pronounced this 
oracular saying. 

"Well, boy," he added, "I must be off. I want to 
see Taxater and Clavering and both the Andersens 
tonight. I might see Quincunx too. Not that I 
think he can do very much." 

"There's only one way you'll get James Andersen 
to help you," remarked Philip, "and I doubt whether 
you'll bring yourself to use that." 

"I suppose you mean," returned his father, "that 
Traffio girl, up at the House. I have heard that they 
have been seen together. But I thought she was going 
to marry John Goring." 

"No, I don't mean her," said the son. "She's all 
right. She's a fine girl, and I am sorry for her, 
whether she marries Goring or not. The person I 
mean is little Ninsy Lintot, up at Wild Pine. She's 
the only one in this place who can get a civil word 
out of Jim Andersen." 

"Ninsy?" echoed his father, "but I thought Ninsy 
was dead and buried. There was some one died up 
at Wild Pine last spring, and I made sure 'twas her." 

"That was her sister Glory," affirmed Philip. "But 
Ninsy is delicate, too. A bad heart, they say — too 
bad for any thoughts of marrying. But she and Jim 
Andersen have been what you might call sweethearts 
ever since she was in short frocks." 

"I have never heard of this," said Mr. Wone. 

"Nor have many other people here, returned 
Philip, "but 'tis true, none the less. And anyone 
who wants to get at friend James must go to him 
through Ninsy Lintot." 

"I am extremely surprised at what you tell me," 



324 WOOD AND STONE 

said Mr. Wone. "Do you really mean that if I got 
this sick child to promise me Andersen's help, he 
really would give it?" 

"Certainly I do," replied Philip. "And what is 
more, he would bring his brother with him." 

"But his brother is thick with Miss Romer. All 
the village is talking about them." 

"Never mind the village — father! You think too 
much of the village and its talk. I tell you — Miss 
Romer or no Miss Romer — if you get James to help 
you, you get Luke. I know something of the ways of 
those two." 

A look of foxy cunning crossed the countenance of 
the Christian Candidate. 

"Do you happen to have any influence with this 
poor Ninsy?" he asked abruptly, peering into his 
son's face. 

Philip's pale cheeks betrayed no embarrassment. 

"I know her," he said. "I like her. I lend her 
books. She will die before Christmas." 

"I wish you would go up and see her for me then," 
said Mr. Wone eagerly. "It would be an excellent 
thing if we could secure the Andersens. They must 
have a lot of influence with the men they work with." 

Philip glanced across the rich sloping meadows 
which led up to the base of the wooded ridge. From 
where they stood he could see the gloomy clump of 
firs and beeches which surrounded the little group of 
cottages known as Wild Pine. 

"Very well," he said. "I don't mind. But no more 
of this nonsense about my not coming home! I 
prefer for the present" — and he gave vent to rather 
an ominous laugh — "to live with my dear parents. 



UNDER-CURRENTS 325 

But, mind — I can't promise anything. These An- 
dersens are queer fellows. One never knows how 
things will strike them. However, we shall see. If 
anyone could persuade our friend James, it would be 
Ninsy." 

The affair being thus settled, the geraniums were 
abandoned; and while the father proceeded down 
the village towards the Gables, the son mounted 
the slope of the hill in the direction of Wild Pine. 

The path Philip followed soon became a narrow 
lane running between two high sandy banks, over- 
topped by enormous beeches. At all hours, and on 
every kind of day, this miniature gorge between the 
wooded fields was a dark and forlorn spot. On an 
evening of a day like the present one, it was nothing 
less than sinister. The sky being doubly dark above, 
dark with the coming on of night, and dark with 
the persistent cloud-veil, the accumulated shadows 
of this sombre road intensified the gloom to a pitch 
of darkness capable of exciting, in agitated nerves, 
an emotion bordering upon terror. Though the sun 
had barely sunk over Leo's Hill, between these ivy- 
hung banks it was as obscure as if night had already 
fallen. 

But the obscurity of Root-Thatch Lane was nothing 
to the sombreness that awaited him when, arrived 
at the hill-top, he entered Nevil's Gully. This was 
a hollow basin of close-growing beech-trees, surrounded 
on both sides by impenetrable thickets of bramble 
and elder, and crossed by the path that led to Wild 
Pine cottages. Every geographical district has its 
typical and representative centre, — some character- 
istic spot which sums up, as it were, and focuses, in 



3£6 WOOD AND STONE 

limited bounds, qualities and attributes that are dif- 
fused in diverse proportions through the larger area. 
Such a centre of the Nevilton district was the place 
through which Philip Wone now hurried. 

Nevil's Gully, however dry the weather, was never 
free from an overpowering sense of dampness. The 
soil under foot was now no longer sand but clay, and 
clay of a particularly adhesive kind. The beech 
roots, according to their habit, had created an empty 
space about them — a sort of blackened floor, spotted 
with green moss and pallid fungi. Out of this, their 
cold, smooth trunks emerged, like silent pillars in the 
crypt of a mausoleum. 

The most characteristic thing, as we have noted, 
in the scenery of Nevilton, is its prevalent weight 
of heavy oppressive moisture. For some climatic or 
geographical reason the foliage of the place seems 
chillier, damper, and more filled with oozy sap, than 
in other localities of the West of England. Though 
there may have been no rain for weeks — as there 
had been none this particular June — the woods in 
this district always give one the impression of re- 
taining an inordinate reserve of atmospheric moisture. 
It is this moisture, this ubiquitous dampness, that 
to a certain type of sun-loving nature makes the 
region so antipathetic, so disintegrating. Such per- 
sons have constantly the feeling of being dragged 
earthward by some steady centripedal pull, against 
which they struggle in vain. Earthward they are 
pulled, and the earth, that seems waiting to receive 
them, breathes heavy damp breaths of in-drawing 
voracity, like the mouth of some monster of the 
slime. 



UNDER-CURRENTS 327 

And if this is true of the general conditions of 
Nevilton geography, it is especially and accumula- 
tively true of Nevil's Gully, which, for some reason 
or other, is a very epitome of such sinister gravitation. 
If one's latent mortality feels the drag of its clayish 
affinity in all quarters of this district, in Nevil's 
Gully it becomes conscious of such oppression as a 
definite demonic presence. For above the Gully 
and above the cottages to which the Gully leads, the 
umbrageous mass of entangled leafiness hangs, fold 
upon fold, as if it had not known the woodman's 
axe since the foot of man first penetrated these 
recesses. The beeches, to which reference has been 
made, are overtopped on the higher ground by ashes 
and sycamores, and these, in their turn, are sur- 
mounted, on the highest level of all, by colossal 
Scotch firs, whose forlorn grandeur gives the cot- 
tages their name. 

Philip hurried, in the growing darkness, across the 
sepulchral gully, and pushed open the gate of the 
secluded cattle-yard which was the original cause of 
this human hamlet. The houses of men in rural 
districts follow the habitations of beasts. Where 
cattle and the stacks that supply their food can 
conveniently be located, there must the dwelling be 
of those whose business it is to tend them. The 
convenience of Wild Pine as a site for a spacious and 
protected farm-yard was sufficient reason for the 
erection of a human shelter for the hands by whose 
labour such places are maintained. 

He crossed the yard with quick steps. A light 
burned in one of the sheds, throwing a fitful flicker 
upon the heaps of straw and the pools of dung- 



328 WOOD AND STONE 

coloured water. Some animal, there — a horse or a 
cow or a pig — was probably giving birth to young. 

From the farm-yard he emerged into the cottage- 
garden, and stumbling across this, he knocked at 
the first door he reached. There was not the least 
sound in answer. Dead unbroken stillness reigned, 
except for an intermittent shuffling and stamping 
from the watcher or the watched in the farm-yard 
behind. 

He knocked again, and even the sounds in the yard 
ceased. Only, high up among the trees above him, 
some large nocturnal bird fluttered heavily from 
bough to bough. 

For the third time he knocked and then the door 
of the next house opened suddenly, emitting a long 
stream of light into which several startled moths 
instantly flew. Following the light came a woman's 
figure. 

"If thee wants Lintot," said the voice of this 
figure, "thee can't see 'im till along of most an hour. 
He be tending a terrible sick beast." 

"I want to see Ninsy," shouted Philip, knocking 
again on the closed door. 

"Then thee must walk in and have done with it," 
returned the woman. "The maid be laid up with 
heart-spasms again and can open no doors this night, 
not if the Lord his own self were hammering." 

Philip boldly followed her advice and entered the 
cottage, closing the door behind him. A faint voice 
from a room at the back asked him what he wanted 
and who he was. 

"It is Philip," he answered, "may I come in and 
see you, Ninsy? It is Philip — Philip Wone." 



UNDER-CURRENTS 329 

He gathered from the girl's low-voiced murmur that 
he was welcome, and crossing the kitchen he opened 
the door of the further room. 

He found Ninsy dressed and smiling, but lying in 
complete prostration upon a low horse-hair sofa. He 
closed the door, and moving a chair to her side, sat 
down in silence, gazing upon her wistfully with his 
great melancholy eyes. 

"Don't look so peaked and pining, Philip-boy," 
she said, laying her white hand upon his and smiling 
into his face. ""lis only the old trouble. 'Tis 
nothing more than what I expect. I shall be about 
again tomorrow or the day after. But I be real glad 
to see 'ee here! Father's biding down in the yard, 
and 'tis a lonesome place to be laid-up in, this poor 
old house." 

Ninsy looked exquisitely fragile and slender, lying 
back in this tender helplessness, her chestnut-coloured 
hair all loose over her pillow. Philip was filled with 
a flood of romantic emotion. The girl had always 
attracted him but never so much as now. It was 
one of his ingrained peculiarities to find hurt and 
unhappy people more engaging than healthy and 
contented ones. He almost wished Ninsy would 
stop smiling and chattering so pleasantly. It only 
needed that she should shed tears, to turn the young 
man's commiseration into passion. 

But Ninsy did not shed tears. She continued 
chatting to him in the most cheerful vein. It was 
only by the faintest shadow that crossed her face 
at intervals, that one could have known that any- 
thing serious was the matter with her. She spoke 
of the books he had lent her. She spoke of the 



330 WOOD AND STONE 

probable break-up of the weather. She talked of 
Lacrima Traffio. 

"I think," she said, speaking with extreme earnest- 
ness, "the young foreign lady is lovely to look at. 
I hope she'll be happy in this marriage. They do say, 
poor dear, she is being driven to it. But with the 
gentry you never know. They aren't like us. Father 
says they have all their marriages thought out for 
them, same as royalty. I wonder who Miss Gladys 
will marry after all! Father has met her several 
times lately, walking with that American gentleman." 

"Has Jim Andersen been up to see you, Ninsy," 
put in Mr. Wone's emissary, "since this last attack 
of yours?" 

The fact that this question left his lips simultane- 
ously with a rising current of emotion in his heart 
towards her is a proof of the fantastic complication 
of feeling in the young anarchist. 

He fretted and chafed under the stream of her 
gentle impersonal talk. He longed to rouse in her 
some definite agitation, even though it meant the 
introduction of his rival's image. The fact that such 
agitation was likely to be a shock to her did not 
weigh with him. Objective consideration for people's 
bodily health was not one of Philip's weaknesses. 
His experiment met with complete success. At the 
mention of James Andersen's name a scarlet flush 
came into the girl's cheeks. 

"No — yes — no!" she answered stammering. 
"That is — I mean — not since I have been ill. But 
before — several times — lately. Why do you look 
at me like that, Philip? You're not angry with me, 
are you?" 



UNDER-CURRENTS 331 

Philip's mind was a confused arena of contradic- 
tory emotions. Among the rest, two stood out and 
asserted themselves — this unpardonable and re- 
morseless desire to trouble her, to embarrass her, to 
make her blush yet more deeply — and a strange 
wild longing to be himself as ill as she was, and of 
the same disease, so that they might die together! 

"My father wanted me to ask you," he blurted 
out, "whether you would use your influence over 
Jim to get him to help in this election business. I 
told my father Jim would do anything you asked 
him." 

The girl's poor cheeks burned more deeply than 
ever at this. 

"I wish you hadn't told him that, Philip," she 
said. "I wish you hadn't! You know very well I 
have no more influence over James than anyone else 
has. It was unkind of you to tell him that! Now 
I am afraid he'll be disappointed. For I shall never 
dare to worry Jim about a thing like that. You don't 
take any interest in this election, Philip, do you?" 

From the tone of this last remark the young anar- 
chist gathered the intimation that Andersen had been 
talking about the affair to his little friend and had 
been expressing opinions derogatory to Mr. Wone's 
campaign. She would hardly have spoken of so lively 
a local event in such a tone of weary disparagement, 
if some masculine philosopher had not been "putting 
ideas into her head." 

"You ought to make him join in," continued 
Philip. "He has such influence down at the works. 
It would be a great help to father. We labouring 
people ought to stand by one another, you know." 



332 WOOD AND STONE 

"But I thought — I thought — ," stammered poor 
Ninsy, pushing back her hair from her forehead, 
"that you had quite different opinions from Mr. 
Wone." 

"Damn my opinions!" cried the excited youth. 
"What do my opinions matter? We are talking of 
Jim Andersen. Why doesn't he join in with the 
other men and help father in getting up the 
strike?" 

"He — he doesn't believe in strikes," murmured 
the girl feebly. 

"Why doesn't he!" cried the youth. "Does he 
think himself different, then, from the rest of us, 
because old Gideon married the daughter of a vicar? 
He ought to be told that he is a traitor to his class. 
Yes — a traitor — a turn-coat — a black-leg! That's 
what he is — if he won't come in. A black- 
leg!" 

They were interrupted by a sharp knock at the 
outer door. The girl raised herself on her elbow and 
became distressingly agitated. 

"Oh, I believe that is Jim," she cried. "What shall 
I do? He won't like to find you here alone with me 
like this. What a dreadful accident!" 

Philip without a moment's delay went to the door 
and opened it. Yes, the visitor was James Andersen. 
The two men looked at one another in silence. James 
was the first to speak. 

"So you are looking after our invalid?" he said. 
"I only heard this afternoon that she was bad 
again." 

He did not wait for the other's response, but 
pushing past him went straight into Ninsy's room. 



UNDER-CURRENTS 333 

"Poor child!" he said, "Poor dear little girl! 
Why didn't you send a message to me? I saw your 
father in the yard and he told me to come on in. 
How are you? Why aren't you in bed? I'm sure 
you ought to be in bed, and not talking to such an 
exciting person as our friend Philip." 

"She won't be talking to me much longer," threw 
in that youth, following his rival to the side of the 
girl's sofa. "I only came to ask her to do something 
for us in this election. She will tell you what I mean. 
Ask her to tell you. Don't forget! Good-bye 
Ninsy," and he held out his hand with a searching 
look into the girl's face, a look at once wistfully en- 
treating and fiercely reproachful. 

She took his hand. "Good night, Philip," she said. 
"Think kindly of me, and think — " this was said 
in a voice so low that only the young man could 
hear — "think kindly of Jim. Good night!" 

He nodded to Andersen and went off, a sombre 
dangerous expression clouding the glance he threw 
upon the clock in the corner. 

"You pay late visits, James Andersen," he called 
back, as he let himself out of the cottage-door. 

Left alone with Ninsy, the stone-carver possessed 
himself of the seat vacated by the angry youth. 
The girl remained quiet and motionless, her hands 
crossed on her lap and her eyes closed. 

"Poor child!" he murmured, in a voice of tender 
and affectionate pity. "I cannot bear to see you like 
this. It almost gives me a sense of shame — my being 
so strong and well — and you so delicate. But you 
will be better soon, won't you? And we will go for 
some of our old walks together." 



334 WOOD AND STONE 

Ninsy's mouth twitched a little, and big tears 
forced their way through her tightly shut eyelids. 

"When your father comes in," he went on, "you 
must let me help him carry you upstairs. And I 
am sure you had better have the doctor tomorrow 
if you are not better. Won't you let me go to Yeo- 
borough for him tonight?" 

Ninsy suddenly struck the side of her sofa with 
her clenched hand. "I don't want the doctor!" 
she burst out, "and I don't want to get better. I 
want to end it all — that's what I want ! I want to 
end it all." 

Andersen made a movement as if to caress her, but 
she turned her head away. 

"I am sick and tired of it all," she moaned. "I 
wish I were dead. Oh, I wish I were dead!" 

The stone-carver knelt down by her side. "Ninsy," 
her murmured, "Ninsy, my child, my friend, what is 
it? Tell me what it is." 

But the girl only went on, in a low soft wail, "I 
knew it would come to this. I knew it. I knew it. 
Oh, why was I ever born! Why wasn't it me, and not 
Glory, who died! I shall die. I want to die!" 

Andersen rose to his feet. "Ninsy!" he said in a 
stern altered voice. "Stop this at once — or I shall 
go straight away and call your father!" 

He assumed an air and tone as if quieting a petu- 
lant infant. It had its effect upon her. She swal- 
lowed down her rising fit of sobs and looked up at 
him with great frightened tearful eyes. 

"Now, child," he said, once more seating himself, 
and this time successfully taking possession of a sub- 
missive little hand, "tell me what all this is about. 



UNDER-CURRENTS 335 

Tell me everything." He bent down and imprinted 
a kiss upon her cold wet cheek. 

"It is — " she stammered, "it is that I think you 
are fond of that Italian girl." She hid her face in a 
fold of her rich auburn hair and went on. "They do 
tell me you walk with her when your brother goes 
with Miss Gladys. Don't be angry with me, Jim. 
I know I have no right to say these things. I know 
I have no claim, no power over you. But we did 
keep company once, Jim, didn't us? And it do stab 
my heart, — to hear them tell of you and she! " 

James Andersen looked frowningly at the window. 

The curtains were not drawn; and a dark ash-branch 
stretched itself across the casement like an extended 
threatening arm. Its form was made visible by a gap 
in the surrounding trees, through which a little cluster 
of stars faintly twinkled. The cloud veil had melted. 

"What a world this is!" the stone-carver thought 
to himself. His tone when he spoke was irritable and 
aggrieved. 

"How silly you are, Ninsy — with your fancies! 
A man can't be civil to a poor lonesome foreign 
wench, without your girding at him as if he had done 
something wrong! Of course I speak to Miss Traffio 
and walk with her too. What else do you expect 
when the poor thing is left lonesome on my hands, 
with Luke and Miss Gladys amusing themselves? 
But you needn't worry," he added, with a certain 
unrestrained bitterness. "It's only when Luke and 
his young lady are together that she and I ever 
meet, and I don't think they'll often be together 
now." 

Ninsy looked at him with questioning eyes. 



336 WOOD AND STONE 

"He and she have quarrelled," he said curtly. 

"Over the American?" asked the girl. 

"Over the American." 

"And you won't be walking with that foreigner 
any more?" 

"I shan't be walking with her any more." 

Ninsy sank back on her pillow with a sigh of in- 
effable relief. Had she been a Catholic she would 
have crossed herself devoutly. As it was she turned 
her head smilingly towards him and extended her 
arms. "Kiss me," she pleaded. He bent down, and 
she embraced him with passionate warmth. 

"Then we belong to each other again, just the same 
as before," she said. 

"Just the same as before." 

"Oh, I wish that cruel doctor hadn't told me I 
mustn't marry. He told father it would kill me, and 
the other one who came said the same thing. But 
wouldn't it be lovely if you and I, Jim — " 

She stopped suddenly, catching a glimpse of his 
face. Her happiness was gone in a moment. 

"You don't love me. Oh, you don't love me! I 
know it. I have known it for many weeks! That girl 
has poisoned you against me — the wicked, wicked 
thing! It's no use denying it. I know it. I feel it, — 
oh, how can I bear it! How can I bear it!" 

She shut her eyes once more and lay miserable and 
silent. The wood-carver looked gloomily out of the 
window. The cluster of stars now assumed a shape 
well-known to him. It was Orion's Belt. His 
thoughts swept sadly over the field of destiny. 

"What a world it is!" he said to himself. "There 
is that boy Philip gone with a tragic heart because 



UNDER-CURRENTS 337 

his girl loves me. And I — I have to wait and wait 
in helplessness, and see the other — the one I care for — 
driven into madness. And she cares not a straw for 
me, who could help her, and only cares for that poor 
fool who cannot lift a finger. And meanwhile, 
Orion's Belt looks contemptuously down upon us 
all! Ninsy is pretty well right. The lucky people 
are the people who are safe out of it — the people 
that Orion's Belt cannot vex any more!" 

He rose to his feet. "Well, child," he said, "I 
think I'll be going. It's no use our plaguing one 
another any further tonight. Things will right them- 
selves, little one. Things will right themselves! Its 
a crazy world — but the story isn't finished yet. 

"Don't you worry about it," he added gently, 
bending over her and pushing the hair back from her 
forehead. "Your old James hasn't deserted you yet. 
He loves you better than you think — better than 
he knows himself perhaps!" 

The girl seized the hand that caressed her and 
pressed it against her lips. Her breast rose and fell 
in quick troubled breathing. 

"Come again soon," she said, and then, with a wan 
smile, "if you care to." 

Their eyes met in a long perplexed clinging fare- 
well. He was the first to break the tension. 

"Good-night, child," he said, and turning away, 
left the room without looking back. 

While these events were occurring at Wild Pine, 
in the diplomatist's study at the Gables Mr. Wone 
was expounding to Mr. Taxater the objects and pur- 
poses of his political campaign. 

Mrs. Wotnot, leaner and more taciturn than ever, 



338 WOOD AND STONE 

had just produced for the refreshment of the visitor 
a bottle of moderately good burgundy. Mr. Taxater 
had demanded "a little wine," in the large general 
manner which his housekeeper always interpreted as 
a request for something short of the very best. It 
was clear that for the treasures of innermost wine- 
cellars Mr. Wone was not among the privileged. 

The defender of the papacy had placed his visitor 
so that the light of the lamp fell upon his perspiring 
brow, upon his watery blue eyes, and upon his droop- 
ing, sandy-coloured moustache. Mr. Taxater himself 
was protected by a carefully arranged screen, out of 
the shadow of which the Mephistophelian sanctity of 
his patient profile loomed forth, vague and indis- 
tinct. 

Mr. Wone's mission was in his own mind tending 
rapidly to a satisfactory conclusion. The theologian 
had heard him with so much attention, had asked 
such searching and practical questions, had shown 
such sympathetic interest in all the convolutions and 
entanglements of the political situation, that Mr. 
Wone began to reproach himself for not having made 
use of such a capable ally earlier in the day. 

"It is," he was saying, "on the general grounds of 
common Christian duty that I ask your help. We 
who recognize the importance of religion would be 
false to our belief if we did not join together to de- 
feat so ungodly and worldly a candidate as this 
Romer turns out to be." 

It must be confessed that in his heart of hearts 
Mr. Wone regarded Roman Catholics as far more 
dangerous to the community than anarchists or 
infidels, but he prided himself upon a discretion 



UNDER-CURRENTS 339 

worthy of apostolic inspiration in thus seeking to 
divide and set asunder the enemies of evangelical 
truth. He found the papist so intelligent a listener, — 
that hardly one secret of his political designs remained 
unshared between them. 

"The socialism," he finally remarked, "which you 
and I are interested in, is Christian Socialism. You 
may be sure that in nothing I do or say there will be 
found the least tincture of this deplorable modern 
materialism. My own feeling is that the closer our 
efforts for the uplifting of the people are founded 
upon biblical doctrines the more triumphant their 
success will be. It is the ethical aspect of this great 
struggle for popular rights which I hold most near 
my heart. I wish to take my place in Parliament 
as representing not merely the intelligence of this 
constituency but its moral and spiritual needs — its 
soul, in fact, Mr. Taxater. There is no animosity 
in my campaign. I am scrupulous about that. I am 
ready, always ready, to do our opponents justice. 
But when they appeal to the material needs of the 
country, I appeal to its higher requirements — to its 
soul, in other words. It is for this reason that I am 
so glad to welcome really intelligent and highly edu- 
cated men, like yourself. We who take this loftier 
view must of course make use of many less admirable 
methods. I do so myself. But it is for us to keep 
the higher, the more ethical considerations, always in 
sight. 

"As I was saying to my son, this very evening, the 
grand thing for us all to remember is that it is only 
on the assumption of Divine Love being at the bot- 
tom of every confusion that we can go to work at all. 



340 WOOD AND STONE 

The Tory party refuse to make this assumption. 
They refuse to recognize the ethical substratum of 
the world. They treat politics as if they were a 
matter of merely imperial or patriotic importance. 
In my view politics and religion should go hand in 
hand. In the true democracy which I aim at estab- 
lishing, all these secular theories — evidently due to 
the direct action of the Devil — such as Free Love 
and the destruction of the family — will not be 
tolerated for a moment. 

"Let no one think," — and Mr. Wone swallowed a 
mouthful of wine with a gurgling sound, — "that 
because we attack capitalism and large estates, 
we have any wish to interfere with the sacredness of 
the home. There are, I regret to say, among some 
of our artizans, wild and dangerous theories of this 
kind, but I have always firmly discountenanced them 
and I always will. That is why, if I may say so, 
I am so well adapted to represent this district. I 
have the support of the large number of Liberal- 
minded tradesmen who would deeply regret the intro- 
duction of such immoral theories into our movement. 
They hold, as I hold, that this unhappy tendency to 
atheistic speculation among our working-classes is 
one of the gravest dangers to the country. They hold, 
as I hold, that the cynical free thought of the Tory 
party is best encountered, not by the equally de- 
plorable cynicism of certain labor-leaders, but by the 
high Christian standards of men like — like our- 
selves, Mr. Taxater." 

He paused for a moment and drew his hand, which 
certainly resembled the hand of an ethical-minded 
dispenser of sugar rather than that of an immoral 



UNDER-CURRENTS 341 

manual labourer, across his damp forehead. Then 
he began again. 

"Another reason which seems to point to me, in 
quite a providential manner, as the candidate for 
this district, is the fact that I was born in Nevilton 
and that my father was born here before me. 

"'Wone' is one of the oldest names in the church 
Register. There were Wones in Nevilton in the days 
of the Norman Conquest. I love the place — Mr. 
Taxater — and I believe I may say that the place 
loves me. I am in harmony with it, you know. 
I understand its people. I understand their little 
weaknesses. Some of these, though you may not 
believe it, I even may say I share. 

" I love this beautiful scenery, these luscious fields, 
these admirable woods. I love to think of them as 
belonging to us — to the people who live among them 
— I love the voice of the doves in our dear trees, 
Mr. Taxater. I love the cattle in the meadows. I 
love the vegetables in the gardens. And I love to 
think" — here Mr. Wone finished his glass, and 
drew the back of his hand across his mouth — "I 
love to think of these good gifts of the Heavenly 
Father as being the expression of His divine bounty. 
Yes, if anywhere in our revered country atheism and 
immorality are condemned by nature herself, it is in 
Nevilton. The fields of Nevilton are like the fields 
of Canaan, they are full of the goodness of the Lord!" 

"Your emotions," said the Papal Apologist at last, 
as his companion paused breathless, "do you credit, 
my dear Sir. I certainly hold with you that it is 
important to counteract the influence of Free-Think- 
ers." 



342 WOOD AND STONE 

"But the love of God, Mr. Taxater!" cried the 
other, leaning forward and crossing his hands over 
his knees. "We must not only refute, we must con- 
struct." Mr. Wone had never felt in higher feather. 
Here was a man capable of really doing him justice. 
He wished his recalcitrant son were present! 

"Construct — that is what I always say," he re- 
peated. "We must be creative and constructive in 
our movement, and fix it firmly upon the Only Foun- 
dation." 

He surveyed through the window the expansive 
heavens; and his glance encountered the same prom- 
inent constellation, which, at that very moment, 
but with different emotions, the agitated stone- 
carver was contemplating from the cottage at Wild 
Pine. 

"You are undoubtedly correct, Mr. Wone," said 
his host gravely, using a tone he might have used 
if his interlocutor had been recommending him to buy 
cheese. "You are undoubtedly correct in finding 
the basis of the system of things in love. It is no 
more than what the Saints have always taught. I 
am also profoundly at one with you in your objection 
to Free Love. Love and Free Love are contradictory 
categories. They might even be called antinomies. 
There is no synthesis which reconciles them." 

Mr. Wone had not the remotest idea what any of 
these words meant, but he felt flattered to the 
depths of his being. It was clear that he had been 
led to utter some profound philosophical maxim. 
He once more wished from his heart that his son 
could hear this conversation! 

"Well, Mr. Taxater," he said, "I must now leave 



UNDER-CURRENTS 343 

you. I have other distinguished gentlemen to call upon 
before I retire. But I thank you for your promised 
support. 

"It would be better, perhaps" — here he lowered 
his voice and looked jocose and crafty — "not to 
refer to our little conversation. It might be mis- 
understood. There is a certain prejudice, you know 
— unjustifiable, of course, but unfortunately, very 
prevalent, which makes it wiser — but I need say no 
more. Good-bye, Mr. Taxater — good night, sir, 
good night!" 

And he bowed himself off and proceeded up the 
street to find the next victim of his evangelical dis- 
cretion. 

As soon as he had gone, Mr. Taxater summoned his 
housekeeper. 

"The next time that person comes," he said, "will 
you explain to him, very politely, that I have been 
called to London? If this seems improbable, or if 
he has caught a glimpse of me through the window, 
will you please explain to him that I am engaged 
upon a very absorbing literary work." 

Mrs. Wotnot nodded. "I kept my eyes open yes- 
terday," the old woman remarked, in the manner of 
some veteran conspirator in the service of a Privy 
Counsellor. 

"As you happened to be looking for laurel-leaves, 
I suppose?" said Mr. Taxater, drawing the red 
curtains across the window, with his expressive 
episcopal hand. "For laurel-leaves, Mrs. Wotnot, to 
flavour that excellent custard?" 

The old woman nodded. "And you saw?" pursued 
her master. 



344 WOOD AND STONE 

"I saw Mr. Luke Andersen and Miss Gladys 
Romer." 

"Were they as happy as usual — these young 
people," asked the theologian mildly, "or were they 
— otherwise?" 

"They were very much what you are pleased to 
call otherwise," answered the old lady. 

"Quarrelling in fact?" suggested the diplomat, 
seating himself deliberately in his arm-chair. 

"Miss Gladys was crying and Mr. Luke was 
laughing." 

The Papal Apologist waved his hand. "Thank 
you, Mrs. Wotnot, thank you. These things will 
happen, won't they — even in Nevilton? Mr. Luke 
laughing, and Miss Gladys crying? Your laurel- 
leaves were very well chosen, my friend. Let me 
have the rest of that custard to-night! I hope you 
have not brought back your rheumatism, Mrs. Wot- 
not, by going so far?" 

The housekeeper shook her head and retired to 
prepare supper. 

Mr. Taxater took up the book by his side and 
opened it thoughtfully. It was the final volume of 
the collected works of Joseph de Maistre. 

Mr. Wone had not advanced far in the direction of 
the church, when he overtook Vennie Seldom walking 
slowly, with down-cast head, in the same direction. 

Vennie had just passed an uncomfortable hour 
with her mother, who had been growing, during the 
recent days, more and more fretful and suspicious. 
1^ was partly to allay these suspicions and partly 
to escape from the maternal atmosphere that she had 
decided to be present that evening at the weekly 



UNDER-CURRENTS 345 

choir-practice, a function that she had found herself 
lately beginning to neglect. Mr. Wone had forgotten 
the choir-practice. It would interfere, he was afraid, 
with his desired interview with Mr. Clavering. Ven- 
nie assured him that the clergyman's presence was 
not essential at these times. 

"He is not musical, you know. He only walks up 
and down the aisle and confuses things. Everybody 
will be glad if you take him away." 

She was a little surprised at herself, even as she 
spoke. To depreciate her best friend in this flippant 
way, and to such a person, showed that her nerves 
were abnormally strained. 

Mr. Wone did not miss the unusual tone. He had 
never been on anything but very distant terms with 
Miss Seldom, and his vanity was hugely delighted by 
this new manner. 

"I am coming into my own," he thought to him- 
self. "My abilities are being recognized at last, by 
all these exclusive people." 

"I hope," he said, tentatively, "that you and your 
dear mother are on our side in this great national 
struggle. I have just been to see Mr. Taxater and, 
he has promised me his energetic support." 

"Has he?" said Vennie in rather a startled voice. 
"That surprises me — a little. I know he does not 
admire Mr. Romer; but I thought " 

"O he is with us — heart and soul with us!" re- 
peated the triumphant Noncomformist. "I am glad 
I went to him. Many of us would have been too 
narrow-minded to enter his house, seeing he is a 
papist. But I am free from such bigotry." 

"And you hope to convert Mr. Clavering, too?" 



346 WOOD AND STONE 

"Certainly; that is what I intend. But I believe 
our excellent vicar needs no conversion. I have 
often heard him speak — at the Social Meeting, you 
know — and I assure you he is a true friend of the 
working-classes. I only wish more of his kind were 
like him." 

"Mr. Clavering is too changeable," remarked Ven- 
nie, hardly knowing what she said. " His moods alter 
from day to day." 

"But you yourself, dear Miss Seldom," the candi- 
date went on. "You yourself are, I think, entirely 
with us?" 

"I really don't know," she answered. "My in- 
terests do not lie in these directions. I sometimes 
doubt whether it greatly matters, one way or the 
other." 

"Whether it matters?" cried Mr. Wone, inhaling 
the night-air with a sigh of protestation. "Surely, 
you do not take that indifferent and thoughtless atti- 
tude? A young lady of your education — of your 
religious feeling! Surely, you must feel that it 
matters profoundly! As we walk here together, 
through this embalmed air, full of so many agreeable 
scents, surely you must feel that a good and great 
God is making his power known at last, known and 
respected, through the poor means of our conse- 
crated efforts? Forgive my speaking so freely to one 
of your position; but it seems to me that you must — 
you at least — be on our side, simply because what 
we are aiming at is in such complete harmony with 
this wonderful Love of God, diffused through all 
things." 

It is impossible to describe the shrinking aversion 



UNDER-CURRENTS 347 

which these words produced upon the agitated nerves 
of Vennie. Something about the Christian candi- 
date seemed to affect her with an actual sense of 
physical nausea. She could have screamed, to feel 
the man so near her — the dragging sound of his feet 
on the road, the way he breathed and cleared his 
throat, the manner in which his hat was tilted, all 
combined to irritate her unendurably. She found 
herself fantastically thinking how much sooner she 
would have married even the egregious John Goring — 
as Lacrima was going to do ■ — than such a one as this. 
What a pass Nevilton had brought itself to — when 
the choice lay between a Mr. Romer and a Mr. Wone! 

An overpowering wave of disgust with the whole 
human race swept over her — what wretched creatures 
they all were — every one of them ! She mentally 
resolved that nothing — nothing on earth — should 
stop her entering a convent. The man talked of 
agreeable odours on the air. The air was poisoned, 
tainted, infected! It choked her to breathe it. 

"I am so glad — so deeply glad, Mr. Wone con- 
tinued, "to have enjoyed the privilege of this little 
quiet conversation. I shall never forget it. I feel as 
though it had brought us wonderfully, beautifully, 
near each other. It is on such occasions as this, that 
one feels how closely, how entirely, in harmony, all 
earnest- minded people are! Here are you, my dear 
young lady, the descendant of such a noble and 
ancient house, expressing in mute and tender silence, 
your sympathy with one who represents the aspira- 
tions of the poorest of the people! This is a sym- 
bolic moment. I cannot help saying so. A symbolic 
and consecrated moment!" 



348 WOOD AND STONE 

"We had better walk a little faster," remarked 
Miss Seldom. 

"We will. We will walk faster," agreed Mr. Wone. 
"But you must let me put on record what this con- 
versation has meant to me! It has made me more 
certain, more absolutely certain than ever, that with- 
out a deep ethical basis our great movement is doomed 
to hopeless failure." 

The tone in which he used the word "ethical" was 
so irritating to Vennie, that she felt an insane long- 
ing to utter some frightful blasphemy, or even in- 
decency, in his ears, and to rush away with a peal 
of hysterical laughter. 

They were now at the entrance to a narrow little 
alley or lane which, passing a solitary cottage and an 
unfrequented spring, led by a short approach directly 
into the village-square. Half way down this lane a 
curious block of Leonian stone stood in the middle of 
the path. What the original purpose of this stone 
had been it were not easy to tell. The upper por- 
tion of it had apparently supported a chain, but 
this had long ago disappeared. At the moment when 
Mr. Wone and Miss Seldom reached the lane's en- 
trance, a soft little scream came from the spot where 
the stone stood; and dimly, in the shadowy darkness, 
two forms became visible, engaged in some osbcure 
struggle. The scream was repeated, followed by a 
series of little gasps and whisperings. 

Mr. Wone glanced apprehensively in the direction 
of these sounds and increased his pace. He was con- 
founded with amazement when he found that Vennie 
had stopped as if to investigate further. The truth 
is, he had reduced the girl to such a pitch of unnatu- 



UNDER-CURRENTS 349 

ral revolt that, for one moment in her life, she felt 
glad that there were flagrant and lawless pleasures in 
the world. 

Led by an unaccountable impulse she made several 
steps up the lane. The figures separated as she ap- 
proached, one of them boldly advancing to meet her, 
while the other retreated into the shadows. The 
one who advanced, finding himself alone, turned and 
called to his companion, "Annie! Where are you? 
Come on, you silly girl! It's all right." 

Vennie recognized the voice of Luke Andersen. 
She greeted him with hysterical gratitude. "I 
thought it was you, Mr. Andersen; but you did 
frighten me! I took you for a ghost. Who is that 
with you?" 

The young stone-carver raised his hat politely. 
"Only our little friend Annie," he said. "I am es- 
corting her home from Yeoborough. We have been 
on an errand for her mother. She's such a baby, 
you know, Miss Seldom, our little Annie. I love 
teasing her." 

"I am afraid you love teasing a great many people, 
Mr. Andersen," said Vennie, recovering her equanim- 
ity and beginning to feel ashamed. "Here is Mr. 
Wone. No doubt, he will be anxious to talk politics 
to you. Mr. Wone!" She raised her voice as the 
astonished Methodist came towards them. "It is 
only Mr. Andersen. You had better talk to him of 
your plans. I am afraid I shall be late if I don't 
go on." She slipped aside as she spoke, leaving the 
two men together, and hurried off towards the 
church. 

Luke Andersen shook hands with the Christian 



350 WOOD AND STONE 

Candidate. "How goes the campaign, the great 
campaign?" he said. "I wonder you haven't talked 
to James about it. James is a hopeless idealist. 
James is an admirable listener. You really ought to 
talk to James. I wish you would talk to him; and 
put a little of your shrewd common-sense into him! 
He takes the populace seriously — a thing you and I 
would never be such fools as to do, eh, Mr. Wone? 

"I am afraid we disturbed you," remarked the 
Nonconformist, "Miss Seldom and I — I think you 
had someone with you. Miss Seldom was quite in- 
terested. We heard sounds, and she stopped." 

"Oh, only Annie" — returned the young man lightly, 
"only little Annie. We are old friends you, know. 
Don't worry about Annie!" 

"It is a beautiful night, is it not? remarked the 
Methodist, peering down the lane. Luke Andersen 
laughed. 

"Are you by any chance, Mr. Wone, interested in 
astronomy? If so, perhaps you can tell me the name 
of that star, over there, between Perseus and Androm- 
eda? No, no; that one — that greenish-coloured 
one! Do you know what that is?" 

"I haven't the least idea," confessed the represen- 
tative of the People "But I am a great admirer of 
Nature. My admiration for Nature is one of the 
chief motives of my life." 

"I believe you," said Luke. "It is one of my 
own, too. I admire everything in it, without any 
exception." 

"I hope," said Mr. Wone, reverting to the purpose 
that, with Nature, shared just now his dominant 
interest, "I hope you are also with us in our struggle 



UNDER-CURRENTS 351 

against oppression? Mr. Taxater and Miss Seldom 
are certainly on our side. I sometimes feel as though 
Nature herself, were on our side, especially on a 
lovely night like this, full of such balmy odours." 

"I am delighted to see the struggle going on," re- 
turned the young man, emphatically. "And I am 
thoroughly glad to see a person like yourself at the 
head of it." 

"Then you, too, will take a part," cried the candi- 
date, joyfully. "This, indeed, has been a successful 
evening! I feel sure now that in Nevilton, at any 
rate, the tide will flow strongly in my favour. Next 
week, I have to begin a tour of the whole district. 
I may not be able to return for quite a long time. 
How happy I shall be to know that I leave the cause 
in such good hands! The strike is the important 
thing, Andersen. You and your brother must work 
hard to bring about the strike. It is coming. I 
know it is coming. But I want it soon. I want it 
immediately." 

"The stone-carver nodded and hummed a tune. 
He seemed to intimate with the whole air of his 
elegant quiescence that the moment had arrived for 
Mr. Wone's departure. 

The Nonconformist felt the telepathic pressure of 
this polite dismissal. He waved his arm. "Good 
night, then; good night! I am afraid I must post- 
pone my talk with Mr. Clavering till another occasion. 
Remember the strike, Andersen! That is what I 
leave in your hands. Remember the strike!" 

The noise of Mr. Wone's retreating steps was 
still audible when Luke returned to the stone in the 
middle of Splash Lane. The sky was clear now 



352 WOOD AND STONE 

and a faint whitish glimmer, shining on the worn 
surface of the stone, revealed the two deep holes in 
it, where the fastenings of the chain had hung. 
The young man tapped the stone with his stick and 
gave a low whistle. An amorphous heap of clothes, 
huddled in the hedge, stirred, and emitted a reproach- 
ful sound. 

"Oh, you're there, are you? he said. "What silly 
nonsense is this? Get up! Let's see your face!" 
He stooped and pulled at the object. After a mo- 
ment's struggle the flexible form of a young girl 
emerged into the light. She held down her head and 
appeared sulky and angry. 

"What's the matter, Annie?" whispered the youth 
encircling her with his arms. 

The girl shook him away. "How could you tell 
Miss Seldom who I was!" she murmured. "How 
could you do it, Luke? If it had been anybody 
else — but for her to know " 

The stone-carver laughed. "Really, child, you are 
too ridiculous! Why, on earth, shouldn't she know, 
more than anyone else?" 

The girl looked fiercely at him. "Because she is 
good," she said. "Because she is the only good 
person in this blasted place!" 

The young man showed no astonishment at this 
outburst. "Come on, darling," he rejoined. "We 
must be getting you home. I daresay, Miss Seldom 
is all you think. It seemed to me, though, that she 
was different from usual tonight. But I expect that 
fool had upset her." 

He let the young girl lean for a moment against 
the shadowy stone while he fumbled for his cigarettes 



UNDER-CURRENTS 353 

and matches. He observed her make a quick move- 
ment with her hands. 

"What are you up to now?" he asked. 

She gave a fierce little laugh. "There!" she cried. 
"I have done it!" 

"What have you done?" he enquired, emitting a 
puff of smoke, and throwing the lighted match into 
the hedge. 

She pressed her hands against the stone and looked 
up at him mischievously and triumphantly. "Look!" 
she said, holding out her fingers in the darkness. He 
surveyed her closely. "What is it? Have you 
scratched yourself?" 

"Light a match and see!" she cried. He lit a 
match and examined the hand she held towards him. 

"You have thrown away that ring!" 

"Not thrown it away, Luke; not thrown it away! 
I have pressed it down into this hole. You can't 
get it out now! Nobody never can!" 

He held the flickering match closely against the 
stone's surface. In the narrow darkness of the 
aperture she indicated, something bright glittered. 

"But this is really annoying of you, Annie," said 
the stone-carver. "I told you that ring was only 
lent to me. She'll be asking for it back tomorrow." 

"Well, you can tell her to come here and get it!" 

"But this is really serious," protested Luke, trying 
in vain to reach the object with his outstretched 
fingers. 

"And I have twisted my hair round it!" the girl 
went on, in exulting excitement, "I have twisted it 
tight around. It will be hard to get it off!" 

Luke continued making ineffectual dives into the 



354 WOOD AND STONE 

hole, while she watched him gleefully. He went to 
the hedge and breaking off a dusty sprig of wound- 
wort prodded the ring with its stalk. 

"You can't do it" she cried, "you can't do it! 
You'll only push it further in!" 

"Damn you, Annie!" he muttered. "This is a 
horrible kind of joke. I tell you, Gladys will want 
this comfounded thing back tomorrow. She's al- 
ready asked me twice for it. She only gave it to 
me for fun." 

The girl leaned across the stone towards him, 
propping herself on the palms of her hands, and 
laughing mischievously. "No one in this village 
can get that ring out of there!" she cried; "no one! 
And when they does, they'll find it all twisted up 
with my hair!" She tossed back her black locks 
defiantly. 

Luke Anderson's thoughts ran upon scissors, pin- 
cers, willow-wands, bramble-thorns, and children's 
arms. 

"Leave it then!" he said. "After all, I can swear 
I lost it. Come on, you little demon!" 

They moved away; and St. Catharine's church 
was only striking the hour of nine, when they sepa- 
rated at her mother's door. 



CHAPTER XV 

MORTIMER ROMER 

THE incredibly halcyon June which had filled 
the lanes and meadows of Nevilton that 
summer with such golden weather, gave place 
at last to July; and with July came tokens of a 
change. 

The more slow-growing hay-fields were still strewn 
with their little lines of brown mown grass waiting 
its hour of "carrying," but the larger number of 
the pastures wore now that freshly verdant and yet 
curiously sad look, which fields in summer wear when 
they have been shorn of their first harvest. The 
corn in the arable-lands was beginning to stand high; 
wheat and barley varying their alternate ripening 
tints, from the rich gold of the one, to the dia- 
phanous glaucous green, so tender and pallid, of the 
other. In the hedges, ragwort, knapweed and scabious 
had completely replaced wild-rose and elder-blossom; 
and in the ditches and by the margins of ponds, 
loosestrife and willow-herb were beginning to bud. 
Even the latest-sprouting among the trees carried 
now the full heavy burden, dark and monotonous, of 
the summer's prime; and the sharp, dry intermittent 
chirping of warblers, finches and buntings, had long 
since replaced, in the garden-bushes, the more flute- 
like cries of the earlier-nesting birds. 

The shadowy woods of the Nevilton valleys, with 



356 WOOD AND STONE 

their thick entangled undergrowth, were less pleasant 
to walk in than they had been. Tall rank growths 
choked the wan remnants of the season's first prime; 
and beneath sombre, indistinguishable foliage, the 
dry, hard-trodden paths lost their furtive enchant- 
ment. Dog-mercury, that delicate child of the under- 
shadows, was no more now than a gross mass of 
tarnished leaves. Enchanter's nightshade took the 
place of pink-campion; only to yield, in its turn, 
to viper's bugloss and flea-bane. 

As the shy gods of the year's tender birth receded 
before these ranker maturings, humanity became 
more prominent. Print-frocked maidens assisted the 
sheep in treading the slopes of Leo's Hill into earthy 
grassless patches. Bits of dirty paper and the litter 
of careless picnickers strewed the most shadowy 
recesses. Smart youths flicked town-bought canes in 
places where, a few weeks before, the squirrel had 
gambolled undisturbed, and the wood-pecker had 
deepened the magical silence by his patent labour. 
Where recently, amid shadowy moss "soft as sleep," 
the delicate petals of the fragile wood-sorrel had 
breathed untroubled in their enchanted aisles of 
leafy twilight, one found oneself reading, upon 
torn card-board boxes, highly-coloured messages to 
the Human Race from energetic Tradesmen. July 
had replaced June. The gods of Humanity had re- 
placed the gods of Nature; and the interlude between 
hay-harvest and wheat-harvest had brought the 
dog-star Sirius into his diurnal ascendance. 

The project of Lacrima's union with Mr. John 
Goring remained, so to speak, "in the air." The 
village assumed it as a certainty; Mr. Quincunx re- 



MORTIMER ROMER 357 

garded it as a probability; and Mr. Goring himself, 
enjoying his yearly session of agreeable leisure, 
meditated upon it day and night. 

Lacrima had fallen into a curious lassitude with 
regard to the whole matter. In these July days, 
especially now that the sky was over-cast by clouds 
and heavy rains seemed imminent, she appeared to 
lose all care or interest in her own life. Her mood 
followed the mood of the weather. If some desperate 
deluge of disaster was brooding in the distance, she 
felt tempted to cry out, "Let it fall!" 

Mr. Quincunx's feelings on the subject remained a 
mystery to her. He neither seemed definitely to 
accept her sacrifice, nor to reject it. He did not 
really — so she could not help telling herself — vis- 
ualize the horror of the thing, as it affected her, in any 
substantial degree. He often made a joke of it; 
and kept quoting cynical and worldly suggestions, 
from the lips of Luke Andersen. 

On the other hand, both from Mr. Homer and 
the farmer, she received quiet, persistent and inex- 
orable pressure; though to do the latter justice, 
he made no further attempts to treat her roughly or 
familiarly. 

She had gone so far once — in a mood of panic- 
stricken aversion, following upon a conversation with 
Gladys — as actually to walk to the vicarage gate, 
with the definite idea of appealing to Vennie; but 
it chanced that in place of Vennie she had observed 
Mrs. Seldom moving among her flower-beds, and the 
grave austerity of the aristocratic old lady had taken 
all resolution from her and made her retrace her 
steps. 



358 WOOD AND STONE 

It must also be confessed that her dislike and fear 
of Gladys had grown to dimensions bordering upon 
monomania. The elder girl at once hypnotized and 
paralyzed her. Her sensuality, her feline caprices, 
her elaborately cherished hatred, reduced the Italian 
to such helpless misery, that any change — even the 
horror of this marriage — assumed the likeness of a 
desirable relief. 

It is also true that by gradual degrees, — for women, 
however little prone to abstract thought, are quick 
to turn the theories of those they love into living 
practice, — she had come to regard the mere physical 
terror of this momentous plunge as a less insur- 
mountable barrier than she had felt at first. With- 
out precisely intending it, Mr. Quincunx had really, 
in a measure — particularly since he himself had come 
to frequent the society of Luke Andersen — achieved 
what might have conventionally been called the 
"corruption" of Lacrima's mind. She found herself 
on several occasions imagining what she would really 
feel, if, escaped for an afternoon from her Priory 
duties, she were slipping off to meet her friend in 
Camel's Cover or Badger's Bottom. 

When the suggestion had been first made to her 
of this monstrous marriage, it had seemed nothing 
short of a sentence of death, and beyond the actual 
consummation of it, she had never dreamed of 
looking. But all this had now imperceptibly changed. 
Many an evening as she sat with her work by Mrs. 
Romer's side, watching Gladys and her father play 
cards, the thought came over her that she might 
just as well enjoy the comparative independence of 
having her own house and her own associations — 



MORTIMER ROMER 359 

even though the price of them were the society of 
such a lump of clay — as live this wretched half-life 
without hope or aim. 

Other moods arrived when the thought of having 
children of her own came to her with something more 
than a mere sense of escape; came to her with the 
enlargement of an opening horizon. She recalled the 
many meandering discourses which Mr. Quincunx 
had addressed to her upon this subject. They had 
not affected her woman's instincts; but they had 
lodged in her mind. A girl's children, so her friend 
had often maintained, do not belong to the father 
at all. The father is nothing — a mere irrelevant 
incident, a mere chance. The mother alone — the 
mother always — has the rights and pleasures, as 
she has the responsibilities and pains of the parental 
relation. She even recalled one occasion of twilight 
philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr. Quincunx 
had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis 
that children, born where there is no love, inherit 
character, appearance, tastes, everything — from the 
mother. 

Lacrima had a dim suspicion that some of these 
less pious theories were due to the perverse Luke, 
who, as the cloudier July days overcast his evening 
rambles, had acquired the habit of strolling at night- 
fall into Mr. Quincunx's kitchen. Once indeed she 
was certain she discerned the trail of this plausible 
heathen in her friend's words. Mr. Quincunx, with 
one of his peculiarly goblin-like leers, had intimated — 
in jest indeed, but with a searching look into her face 
that it would be no very difficult task to deceive, — 
in shrewd Panurgian roguery, this clumsy clown. 



360 WOOD AND STONE 

His words at the time had hurt and shocked her; 
and her reaction from them had led to the spoiling 
of a pleasant conversation; but they invaded after- 
wards, more deeply than she would have cared to 
confess, her hours of dreamy solitude. 

Her southern imagination, free from both the 
grossness and the hypocrisy of the Nevilton mind, 
was much readier to wander upon an antinomian 
path — at least in its wayward fancies — than it 
would have been, had circumstances not led her 
away from her inherited faith. 

While the sensuality of Gladys left her absolutely 
untouched, the anarchistic theories of her friend — 
especially now they had been fortified and directed 
by the insidious Luke — gave her intelligence many 
queer and lawless topics of solitary brooding. Her 
senses, her instincts, were as pure and unsophisticated 
as ever; but her conscience was besieged and threat- 
ened. It was indeed a queer role — this, which fate 
laid upon Mr. Quincunx — the role of undermining 
the reluctance of his own sweetheart to make a 
loveless marriage — but it was one for which his 
curious lack of physical passion singularly fitted 
him. 

Had Vennie Seldom or Hugh Clavering been aware 
of the condition of affairs they would have con- 
demned Mr. Quincunx in the most wholesale man- 
ner. Clavering would probably have been tempted 
to apply to him some of the most abusive language 
in the dictionary. But it is extremely question- 
able whether this judgment of theirs would have been 
justified. 

A more enlightened planetary observer, initiated 



MORTIMER ROMER 361 

into the labyrinthine hearts of men, might well have 
pointed out that Mr. Quincunx's theories were largely 
a matter of pure speculation, humorously remote 
from any contact with reality. He might also have 
reminded these indignant ones that Mr. Quincunx 
quite genuinely laboured under the illusion — if 
it were an illusion — that for his friend to be mistress 
of the Priory and free of her dependence on the 
Romers was a thing eminently desirable, and worth 
the price she paid for it. Such an invisible clair- 
voyant might even have surmised, what no one in 
Nevilton who knew of Mr. Romer's offer would for 
one second have believed; namely, that he would 
have given her the same advice had there been no 
such offer, simply on the general ground of binding 
her permanently to the place. 

The fact, however, remained, that by adopting this 
ambiguous and evasive attitude Mr. Quincunx re- 
duced the more heroic and romantic aspect of the 
girl's sacrifice to the lowest possible level, and flung 
her into a mood of reckless and spiritless indifference. 
She was brought to the point of losing all interest 
in her own fate and of simply relapsing upon the 
tide of events. 

It was precisely to this condition that Mr. Romer 
had desired to bring her. When she had first at- 
tracted him, and had fallen into his hands, there had 
been certain psychological contests between them, in 
which the quarry-owner had by no means emerged 
victorious. It was the rankling memory of these 
contests — contests spiritual rather than material — 
which had issued in his gloomy hatred of her and his 
longing to corrupt her mind and humiliate her soul. 



362 WOOD AND STONE 

This corruption, this humiliation had been long in 
coming. It had seemed out of his own power and 
out of the power of his feline daughter to bring 
it about; but this felicitous plan of using the 
girl's own friend to assist her moral disentegra- 
tion appeared to have changed the issue very com- 
pletely. 

Mr. Romer, watching her from day to day, became 
more and more certain that her integral soul, the in- 
most fortress of her self-respect, was yielding inch 
by inch. She had flung the rudder down; and was 
drifting upon the tide. 

It might have been a matter of surprise to some 
ill-judging psychologists that a Napoleonic intriguer, 
of the quarry-owner's type, should ever have entered 
upon a struggle apparently so unequal and unim- 
portant as that for the mere integrity of a solitary 
girl's spirit. Such a judgment would display little 
knowledge of the darker possibilities of human char- 
acter. Resistance is resistance, from whatever quar- 
ter it comes; and the fragile soul of a helpless Pariah 
may be just as capable of provoking the aggressive 
instincts of a born master of men as the most obdurate 
of commercial rivals. 

There are certain psychic oppositions to our will, 
which, when once they have been encountered, re- 
main indelibly in the memory as a challenge and a 
defiance, until their provocation has been wiped out 
in their defeat. It matters nothing that such opposi- 
tions should spring from weak or trifling quarters. 
We have been baffled, thwarted, fooled; and we can- 
not recover the feeling of identity with ourselves, 
until, like a satisfied tidal wave, our will has drowned 



MORTIMER ROMER 363 

completely the barricades that defied it. It matters 
nothing if at the beginning, what we were thwarted 
by was a mere trifle, a straw upon the wind, a 
feather in the breeze. The point is that our will, in 
flowing outwards, at its capricious pleasure, met 
with opposition — met with resistance. We do not 
really recover our self-esteem until every memory of 
such an event has been obliterated by a complete 
revenge. 

It is useless to object that a powerful ambitious 
man of the Romer mould, contending Atlas-like under 
a weight of enormous schemes, was not one to harbour 
such long-lingering rancour against a mere Pariah. 
There was more in the thing than appears on the 
surface. The brains of mortal men are queer cru- 
cibles, and the smouldering fires that heat them 
are driven by capricious and wanton guests. La- 
crima's old defeat of the owner of Leo's Hill — a de- 
feat into which there is no need to descend now, for 
its "terrain" was remote from our present stage — 
had been a defeat upon what might be called a sub- 
liminal or interior plane. 

It was almost as if he had encountered her and she 
had encountered him, not only in the past of this 
particular life, but a remoter past — in a past of 
some pre-natal incarnation. There are — as is well- 
known, many instances of this unfathomable con- 
flict between certain human types — types that seem 
to find one another, that seem to be drawn to one 
another, by some pre-ordained necessity in the occult 
influences of mortal fate. It matters nothing in re- 
gard to such a conflict, that on one side should be 
strength, power and position, and on the other weak- 



364 WOOD AND STONE 

ness and helplessness. The soul is the soul, and has 
its own laws. 

It is a case of what a true initiate into the secrets 
of our terrestrial drama might entitle Planetary 
Opposition. By some hidden law of planetary op- 
position, this frail child of the Apennine ridges was 
destined to provoke, to an apparently quite unequal 
struggle, this formidable schemer from the money- 
markets of London. 

In these strange pre-natal attractions and re- 
pulsions between men and women, the mere con- 
ventional differences of rank and social importance 
are as nothing and less than nothing. 

Vast unfathomable tides of cosmic conflict drive us 
all backwards and forwards; and if under the as- 
cendance of Sirius in the track of the Sun, the master 
of Nevilton found himself devoting more energy to 
the humiliation of his daughter's companion than to 
his election to the British Parliament, one can only 
remember that both of them — the strong and the 
weak — were merely puppets and pawns of elemental 
forces, compared with which he, as well as she, was 
as the chaff before the wind. 

It was one of the peculiarities of this Nevil- 
ton valley to draw to itself, as we have already 
hinted, and focus strangely in itself, these airy and 
elemental oppositions. To rise above the clash of 
the Two Mythologies on this spot, with all their 
planetary "auxiliar gods," one would have had 
to ascend incredibly high into that star-sown 
space above — perhaps so high, that the whole 
solar system, rushing madly through the ether 
towards the constellation of Hercules, would have 



MORTIMER ROMER 365 

shown itself as less than a cluster of wayward fire- 
flies. From a height as supreme as this, the difference 
between Mortimer Romer and Lacrima Traffio would 
have been less than the difference between two 
summer-midges transacting their affairs on the edge 
of a reed in Auber Lake. 

Important or unimportant, however, the struggle 
went on; and, as July advanced, seemed to tend 
more and more to Mr. Romer's advantage. Pre- 
cisely what he desired to happen was indeed happen- 
ing — Lacrima's soul was disintegrating; her powers 
of resistance were diminishing; and a reckless care- 
lessness about her personal fate was taking the place 
of her old sensitive apprehensions. 

Another important matter went well at this time 
for Mr. Romer. His daughter became formally en- 
gaged to the wealthy American. Dangelis had been 
pressing her, for many weeks, to come to some 
definite decision, between himself and Lord Tintin- 
hull's heir, and she had at last made up her mind and 
given him her promise. 

The Romers were enchanted at this new develop- 
ment. Mrs. Romer had always disliked the thought 
of having to enter into closer relations with the 
aristocracy — relations for which she was so obviously 
unsuited; and Ralph Dangelis fitted in exactly with 
her idea of what her son-in-law should be. 

Mr. Romer, too, found in Dangelis just the sort of 
son he had always longed for. He had quite recog- 
nized, by this time, that the "artistic" tastes of the 
American and his unusual talent interfered in no 
way with the possession of a very shrewd intellectual 
capacity. Dangelis had indeed all the qualities that 



366 WOOD AND STONE 

Mr. Romer most admired. He was strong. He was 
clever. He was an entertaining companion. He was 
at once very formidable and very good-tempered. 
And he was immensely rich. 

It would have annoyed him to see Gladys domi- 
nate a man of this sort with her capricious ways. 
But he had not the remotest fear that she would 
dominate this citizen of Ohio. Dangelis would pet her 
and spoil her and deluge her with money, but keep 
a firm and untroubled hand over her; and that 
exactly suited Mr. Romer's wishes. The man's 
wealth would also be an immense help to himself in 
his financial undertakings. Together they would be 
able to engineer colossal and world-shaking schemes. 

It was a satisfaction, too, to think that, when he 
died, his loved quarries on Leo's Hill and his historic 
Leonian House should fall into the hands, not of these 
Ilchesters and Ilminsters and Evershots — families 
whose pretensions he hated and derided — but of an 
honest descendant of plain business men of his own 
class. 

It was Mrs. Romer, and not her husband, who 
uttered a lament that the House after their death 
should no longer be the property of one of their own 
name. She proposed that Gladys' American should be 
induced to change his name. But Mr. Romer would 
hear nothing of this. His system was the old im- 
perial Roman system, of succession by adoption. 
The man who could deal with the Legions, the man 
who was strong enough to suppress strikes on Leo's 
Hill, and cope successfully with such rascals as this 
voluble Wone, was the man to inherit Nevilton! 
Be his patronymic what you please, such a man was 



MORTIMER ROMER 367 

Caesar. Himself, a new-comer, risen from nothing, 
and contemptuous of all tradition, it had constantly 
been a matter of serious annoyance to him that the 
wealth he had amassed should only go to swell the 
pride of these fatuous landed gentry. It delighted 
him to think that Gladys' children — the future in- 
heritors of his labour — should be, on their father's 
side also, from new and untraditional stock. It 
gave him immense satisfaction to think of disappoint- 
ing Lord Tintinhull, who no doubt had long ago 
told his friends how sad it was that his son had got 
entangled with that girl at Nevilton; but how nice 
it was that Nevilton House should in the future 
take its proper place in the county. 

There was one cloud on Mr. Romer's horizon at 
this moment, and that cloud was composed of vapours 
spun from the brain of his parliamentary rival, the 
eloquent Methodist. 

Mr. Wone had long been at work among the Leo's 
Hill quarry-men, encouraging them to strike. Until 
the second week in July his efforts had been fruitless; 
but with the change in the weather to which we have 
referred, the strike came. It had already lasted 
some seven or eight days, when a Saturday arrived 
which had been selected, several months before, for 
a great political gathering on the summit of Leo's 
Hill. This was a meeting of radicals and socialists 
to further the cause of Mr. Wone's campaign. 

Leo's Hill had been, for many generations, the site 
of such local gatherings. These gatherings were not 
confined to political demonstrators. They were usu- 
ally attended by circus-men and other caterers to 
proletarian amusement; and were often quite as 



368 WOOD AND STONE 

lively, in their accompaniments of feasting and fes- 
tivity, as any country fair. 

The actual speaking took place at the extreme 
northern end of the hill, where there was a singular 
and convenient feature, lending itself to such assem- 
blies, in the formation of the ground. This was the 
grassy outline, still emphasizing quite distinctly its 
ancient form, of the military Roman amphitheatre 
attached to the camp. Locally the place was known 
as "the Frying-pan", from its marked and grotesque 
resemblance to that utensil; but no base culinary 
appellation, issue of Anglo-Saxon unimaginativeness, 
could conceal the formidable classic moulding of 
its well-known shape — the shape of the imperial 
colisseum. 

Between the Frying-pan and the southern side 
of the hill, where the bulk of the quarries were, rose 
a solitary stone building. One hardly expected the 
presence of such a building in such a place, for it 
was a considerable-sized inn; but the suitableness of 
the grassy expanses of the ancient camp for all 
manner of tourist- jaunts accounted for its erection; 
and doubtless it served a good purpose in softening 
with interludes of refreshment the labours of the 
quarry-men. 

It was the presence of this admirable tavern so 
near the voice of the orator, that led Mr. Romer, 
himself, to stroll, on that Saturday, in the direction 
of his rival's demonstration. Though the more con- 
siderable of his quarries were at the southern end of 
the hill, certain new excavations, in the success of 
which he took exceptional interest, had been latterly 
made in its very centre, and within a stone's throw 



MORTIMER ROMER 369 

of the tavern-door. The great cranes, used in this 
new invasion, stood out against the sky from the 
highest part of the hill, and assumed, especially at 
sunset, when their shape was rendered most em- 
phatic, the form of enormous compasses, planted 
there by some gigantic architectural hand. 

It was in relation to these new works that Mr. 
Romer, towards the close of the afternoon, found him- 
self advancing along the narrow path that led, be- 
tween clumps of bracken and furze-bushes, from the 
most westward of his woods to the hill's base. Mr. 
Lickwit had informed him that there was talk, 
among some of the more intransigeant of the Yeo- 
borough socialists, about destroying these cranes. 
Objections had been brought against them, in recent 
newspaper articles, on purely aesthetic grounds. It 
was said they disfigured the classic outline of the 
hill, and interfered with a land-mark which had been 
a delight to every eye for unnumbered ages. 

It was hardly to be supposed that the more official 
of the supporters of Mr. Wone would condone any 
such outbreak. It was unlikely that Wone himself 
would do so. The "Christian Candidate," as his 
Methodist friends called him, was in no way a man 
of violence. But the fact that there had been this 
pseudo-public criticism of the works from an un- 
political point of view might lend colour to any sort 
of scandal. There were plenty of bold spirits among 
the by-streets of Yeoborough who would have loved 
nothing better than to send Mr. Romer's cranes 
toppling over into a pit, and indeed it was the sort 
of adventure which would draw all the more restless 
portion of the meeting's audience. The possibility 



370 WOOD AND STONE 

was the more threatening because the presence of 
this kind of general fair attracted to the hill all 
manner of heterogeneous persons quite unconnected 
with the locality. 

But what really influenced Mr. Romer in making 
his own approach to the spot, was the neighbourhood 
of the Half Moon. Where there was drink, he argued, 
people would get drunk; and where people got drunk, 
anything might happen. He had instituted Mr. 
Lickwit to remain on guard at the eastern works; 
and he had written to the superintendent of police 
suggesting the advisability of special precautions. 
But he felt nervous and ill at ease as he listened, 
from his Nevilton terrace, to the distant shouts and 
clamour carried to him on the west wind; and true 
to his Napoleonic instincts, he proceeded, without 
informing anyone of his intention, straight to the 
zone of danger. 

The afternoon was very hot, though there was no 
sun. The wind blew in threatening gusts, and the 
quarry-owner noticed that the distant Quantock 
Moors were overhung with a dark bank of lowering 
clouds. It was one of those sinister days that have 
the power of taking all colour and all interest out of 
the earth's surface. The time of the year lent itself 
gloomily to this sombre unmasking. The furze- 
bushes looked like dead things. Many of them had 
actually been burnt in some wanton conflagration; 
and their prickly branches carried warped and 
blighted seeds. The bracken, near the path, had been 
dragged and trodden. Here and there its stalks pro- 
truded like thin amputated arms. The elder-bushes, 
caught in the wind, showed white and metallic, as 



MORTIMER ROMER 371 

if all their leaves had been dipped in some brackish 
water. All the trees seemed to have something of 
this dull, whitish glare, which did not prevent them 
from remaining, in the recesses of their foliage, as 
drearily dark as the dark dull soil beneath them. 
The grass of the fields had a look congruous with the 
rest of the scene; a look as if it had been one large 
velvety pall, drawn over the whole valley. 

In the valley itself, along the edges of this grassy 
hall, the tall clipped elm-trees stood like mourning 
sentinels bowing towards their dead. Drifting but- 
terflies, principally of the species known as the 
"Lesser Heath" and the "Meadow-Brown," whirled 
past his feet as he walked, in troubled and tarnished 
helplessness. Here and there a weak dilapidated 
currant-moth, the very epitome of surrender to cir- 
cumstance, tried in vain to arrest its enforced flight 
among the swaying stalks of grey melancholy thistles, 
the only living things who seemed to find the temper 
of the day congenial with their own. 

When he reached the base of the hill, Mr. Romer 
was amazed at the crowd of people which the fes- 
tivity had attracted to the place. He had heard 
them passing down the roads all day from the seclu- 
sion of his garden, and to judge by such vehicles 
as he had secured a glimpse of from the entrance to 
his drive, many of them must have come from miles 
away. But he had never expected a crowd like this. 
It seemed to cover the whole northern side of the 
hill, swaying to and fro, like some great stream of 
voracious maggots, in the body of a dead animal. 

Round the cranes, in the centre of the hill, the 
crowd seemed especially thick. He made out the 



372 WOOD AND STONE 

presence there of several large caravans, and he heard 
the music of a merry-go-round from that direction. 
This latter sound, in its metallic and ferocious gaiety, 
seemed especially adapted to the character of the 
scene. It seemed like the very voice of some savage 
Dionysian helot-feast, celebrated in defiance of all 
constituted authority. It was such music as Caliban 
would have loved. 

Unwilling to arouse unnecessary anger by making 
his presence known, while there was no cause, Mr. 
Romer left the Half Moon on his right, and crossing 
the brow of the hill diagonally, by a winding path 
that encircled the grassy hollows of innumerable 
ancient quarries, arrived at the foot of an immense 
circular tumulus which dominated the whole scene. 
This indeed was the highest point of Leo's Hill, and 
from its summit one looked far away towards the 
Bristol Channel in one direction, and far away 
towards the English Channel in another. It was, as 
it were, the very navel and pivot of that historic 
region. From this spot one obtained a sort of birds- 
eye view of the whole surface of Leo's Hill. 

Here Mr. Romer found himself quite alone, and 
from here, with hands clasped behind him, he sur- 
veyed the scene with a grave satiric smile. He could 
see his new works with the immense cranes reaching 
into the sky above them. He could see the swaying 
crowd round the amphitheatre at the extreme corner 
of the promontory; and he could see, embosomed in 
trees to the left of Nevilton's Mount, a portion of 
his own Elizabethan dwelling. 

Mr. Romer felt strong and confident as he looked 
down on all these things. He always seemed to renew 



MORTIMER ROMER 373 

the forces of his being when he visited this grass- 
covered repository of his wealth and influence. Leo's 
Hill suited his temper, and he felt as though he suited 
the temper of Leo's Hill. Between the man who 
exploited the stone, and the great reservoir of the 
stone he exploited, there seemed an illimitable affinity. 

He looked down with grim and humorous contempt 
at the noisy crowd thus invading his sacred domain. 
They might harangue their hearts out, — those be- 
sotted sentimentalists, — he could well afford to let 
them talk! They might howl and dance and feast 
and drink, till they were as dazed as Comus' rabble, 
— he could afford to let them shout ! Probably Mr. 
Wone, the "Christian Candidate," was even at that 
moment, making his great final appeal for election 
at the hands of the noble, the free, the enlightened 
constituency of Mid-Wessex. 

Romer felt an immense wave of contempt surge 
through his veins for this stream of fatuous humanity 
as it swarmed before his eyes like an army of dis- 
turbed ants. How little their anger or their affection 
mattered to him — or mattered to the world at large ! 
He would have liked to have seized in his hands 
some vast celestial torch and suffocated them all 
in its smoke, as one would choke out a wasp's nest. 
Their miserable little pains and pleasures were not 
worth the trouble Nature had taken in giving them 
the gift of life. Dead or alive — happy or unhappy — 
they were not deserving of any more consideration 
than a cloud of gnats that one brushed away from 
one's face. 

The master of Leo's Hill drew a deep breath and 
lietened to the screams of the merry-go-round. 



374 WOOD AND STONE 

Something in the strident machine made him think 
of hymn-singing and mob-religion. This Religion of 
Sentiment and Self-Pity with which they cloak their 
weakness and their petty rancour — what is it, he 
thought, but an excuse of escaping from the necessity 
of being strong and fearless and hard and formidable? 
It is easier — so much easier — to draw back, and 
go aside, and deal in paltry subterfuges and sneaking 
jealousies, veneered over with hypocritical unction, 
than to strike out and pursue one's own way drastic- 
ally and boldly. 

He folded his arms and frowned. What is it, he 
muttered to himself, this hidden Force, this Power, 
this God, to which they raise their vague appeals 
against the proud, clear, actual domination of natural 
law and unscrupulous strength? Is there really some 
other element in the world, some other fact, from 
which they can draw support and encouragement? 
There cannot be! He looked at the lowering sky 
above him, and at the grey thistles and little patches 
of thyme under his feet. All was solid, real, unyield- 
ing. There was no gap, no open door, in the stark 
surface of things, through which such a mystery might 
enter. 

He found himself vaguely wondering whose grave 
this had originally been, this great flat tumulus, upon 
which he stood and hated the mob of men. There 
was a burnt circle in the centre of it, with blackened 
cinders. The place had been used for some recent 
national rejoicing, and they had raised a bonfire 
here. He supposed that there must have been a 
much more tremendous bonfire in the days when — 
perhaps before the Romans — this mound was raised 



MORTIMER ROMER 375 

to celebrate some savage chieftain. He wondered 
whether, in his life-time, this long-buried, long-for- 
gotten one had stood, even as he stood now, and 
cried aloud to the Earth and the Sky in sick loathing 
of his wretched fellow-animals. 

He humorously speculated whether this man also, 
this ancient challenger of popular futility, had been 
driven to strange excesses by the provocative resist- 
ance of some feeble girl, making her mute appeals to 
the suppressed conscience in him, and calling in the 
help of tender compassionate gods? Had they sof- 
tened this buried chieftain's heart, these gods of 
slavish souls and weak wills, before he went down 
into darkness? Or had he defied them to the last 
and died lonely, implacable, contemptuous? 

The quarry-owner's ears began to grow irritated 
at last by these raucous metallic sounds and by the 
laughter and the shouting. It was so precisely as if 
this foolish crowd were celebrating, in drunken ecstasy, 
a victory won over him, and over all that was clear- 
edged, self-possessed, and effectual, in this confused 
world. He struck off the heads of some of the grey 
thistles with his cane, and wished they had been the 
heads of the Christian Candidate and his oratorical 
associates. 

Presently his attention was excited by a tremendous 
hubbub at the northern extremity of the hill. The 
crowd seemed to have gone mad. They cheered 
again and again, and seemed vociferating some popu- 
lar air or some marching-song. He could almost 
catch the words of this. The curious thing was that 
he could not help in his heart dallying with the strange 
wish that in place of being the man at the top, he 



376 WOOD AND STONE 

had been one of these men at the bottom. How dif- 
ferently he would have conducted the affair. He knew, 
from his dealings with the country families, how 
deep this revolutionary rage with established tradi- 
tion could sink. He sympathized with it himself. 
He would have loved to have flung the whole sleek 
structure of society into disorder, and to have shaken 
these feeble rulers out of their snug seats. But this 
Wone had not the spirit of a wood-louse! Had he 
— Romer — been at this moment the arch-revolu- 
tionary, in place of the arch-tyrant, what a difference 
in method and result! Did they think, these idiots, 
that eloquent words and appeals to Justice and 
Charity would change the orbits of the planets? 

He strode impatiently to the edge of the tumulus. 
Yes, there was certainly something unusual going 
forward. The crowd was swaying outwards, was 
scattering and wavering. Men were running to and 
fro, tossing their hats in the air and shouting. At 
last there really was a definite event. The whole 
mass of the crowd seemed to be seized simultaneously 
with a single impulse. It began to move. It began 
to move in the direction of his new quarries. The 
thrill of battle seized the heart of the master of 
Nevilton with an exultant glow. So they were really 
going to attempt something — the incapable sheep ! 
This was the sort of situation he had long cried out 
for. To have an excuse to meet them, face to face, 
in a genuine insurrection, this was worthier of a 
man's energy than quarrelling with wretched Social 
Meetings. 

He ran down the side of the tumulus and hastened 
to meet the approaching mob. By leaving the path 



MORTIMER ROMER 377 

and skirting the edge of several disused quarries he 
should, he thought, easily be able to reach his new 
works long before they did. The tall cranes served 
as a guide. To his astonishment he found, on ap- 
proaching his objective, that the mob had swerved, 
and were now streaming forward in a long wavering 
line, between the Half Moon tavern and the lower 
slopes, towards the southern end of the hill. 

"Ah!" he muttered under his breath, "this is more 
serious! They are going to attack the offices." 

By this time, the bulk of the crowd had got so far 
that it would have been impossible for him to inter- 
cept or anticipate them. 

Among the more cautious sight-seers who, mixed 
with women and children, were trailing slowly in the 
rear, he was quite certain he made out the figures of 
Wone and his fellow-politicians. "Just like him," he 
thought. "He has stirred them up with his speeches 
and now he is hiding behind them! I expect he will 
be sneaking off home presently." The figure he sup- 
posed to be that of the Christian Candidate did, 
as a matter of fact, shortly after this, detach him- 
self from the rest of his group and retire quietly and 
discreetly towards the path leading to Nevilton. 

Romer retraced his steps as rapidly as he could. 
He repassed the tumulus, crossed a somewhat pre- 
cipitous bank between two quarries, and emerged 
upon the road that skirts the western brow of the 
hill. This road he followed at an impetuous pace, 
^listening, as he advanced, for any sound of destruc- 
tion and violence. When he arrived at the open 
level between the two largest of his quarries he found 
himself at the edge of a surging and howling mob. 



378 WOOD AND STONE 

He could see over their heads the low slate roofs of 
his works, and he could see that someone, mounted 
on a large slab of stone, was haranguing the people 
near him, but more than this it was impossible to 
make out and it was extremely difficult to get any 
closer. The persons on the outskirts of the crowd 
were evidently strangers, and with no interest in 
the affair at all beyond excited curiosity, for he heard 
them asking one another the most vague and con- 
fused questions. 

Presently he observed the figure of a policeman 
rise behind the man upon the stone and jerk him to 
the ground. This was followed by a bewildering 
uproar. Clenched hands were raised in the air, and 
wild cries were audible. He fancied he caught the 
sound of the syllable "fire." 

Romer was seized with a mad lust of contest. He 
struggled desperately to force his way through to 
the front, but the entangled mass of agitated, per- 
spiring people proved an impassable barrier. 

He began hastily summing up in his mind what 
kind of destruction they could achieve that would 
cause him any serious annoyance. He remembered 
with relief that all the more delicate pieces of carved 
work were down at Nevilton Station. They could 
do little damage to solid blocks of stone, which were 
all they would find inside those wooden sheds. They 
might injure the machinery and the more fragile 
of the tools, but they could hardly do even that, 
unless they were aided by some of his own men. He 
wondered if his own men — the men on strike — 
were among them, or if the rioters were only roughs 
from Yeoborough. Let them burn the sheds down! 



MORTIMER ROMER 379 

He did not value the sheds. They could be replaced 
tomorrow. Their utmost worth was hardly the price 
of a dozen bottles of champagne. It gave him a 
thrill of grim satisfaction to think of the ineffectual- 
ness of this horde of gesticulating two-legged creatures, 
making vain assaults upon slabs of impervious rock 
Man against Stone! It was a pleasant and symbolic 
struggle. And it could only have one issue. 

Finding it impossible to move forward, and not 
caring to be observed by anyone who knew him 
hemmed in in this ridiculous manner among staring 
females and jocose youths, Romer edged himself 
backwards, and, hot and breathless, got clear of the 
crowd. 

The physical exhaustion of this effort — for only 
a man of considerable strength could have advanced 
an inch through such a dense mass — had materially 
diminished his thirst for a personal encounter. He 
smiled to himself to think how humorous it would 
be if he could, even now, overtake the escaping Mr. 
Wone, and offer his rival restorative refreshment, in 
the cool shades of his garden ! For the prime originals 
of this absurd riot to be drinking claret-cup upon a 
grassy lawn, while the misled and deluded populace 
were battering their heads against the stony heart 
of Leo's Hill, struck Mr. Romer as a curiously suit- 
able climax to the days' entertainment. Hardly 
thinking of what he did, he clambered up the side of 
a steep bank, where a group of children were playing, 
and looked across the valley. Surely that solitary 
black figure retreating so furtively, so innocently, 
along the path towards the wood, could be no one 
but the Christian Candidate! 



380 WOOD AND STONE 

Mr. Romer burst out laughing. The discreet fugi- 
tive looked so absurdly characteristic in his shuffling 
retirement, that he felt for the moment as if the 
whole incident were a colossal musical-comedy farce. 
A puff of smoke above the heads of the crowd, and 
a smell of burning, made him serious again. "Damn 
them!" he muttered. "They shall not get off without 
anything being done." 

From his present position he was able to discern 
how he could get round to the sheds. On their 
remoter side he saw that the crowd had considerably 
thinned away. He made out the figures of some 
policemen there, bending, it appeared, over something 
upon the ground. 

It did not take him long to descend from his post, 
to skirt the western side of the quarries, and to 
reach the spot. He found that the object upon the 
ground was no other than his manager Lickwit, 
gasping and pallid, with a streak of blood running 
down his face. From the policemen he learnt that 
an entrance had been forced into the sheds, and the 
more violent of the rioters — the ones who had laid 
Mr. Lickwit low — were now regaling themselves in 
that shelter upon the contents of a barrel of cider, 
whose hiding-place someone had unearthed. The fire 
was already trampled upon and extinguished. He 
learnt further that a messenger had been sent to 
summon more police to the spot, and that it was to 
be hoped that the revellers within the shed would 
continue their opportune tippling until their arrival. 
This, however, was not what fate intended. Reel- 
ing and shouting, the half-a-dozen joyous Calibans 
emerged from their retreat and proceeded to address 



MORTIMER ROMER 381 

the people, all vociferating at the same time, and each 
interrupting the other. The more official and re- 
spectable among the politicians had either retired 
altogether from the scene or were cautiously watching 
it, from the safe obscurity of the general crowd, and 
the situation around the stone-works was completely 
in the hands of the rioters. 

Mr. Romer, having done what he could for the 
comfort of his manager, who was really more fright- 
ened than hurt, turned fiercely upon the aggressors. 
He commanded the two remaining policemen — the 
third was helping Lickwit from the scene — to arrest 
on the spot these turbulent ruffians, who were now 
engaged in laying level with the ground a tool-shed 
adjoining the one they had entered. They were 
striking at the corner-beams of this erection with 
picks and crow-bars. Others among the crowd, push- 
ing their less courageous neighbours forward, began 
throwing stones at the policemen, uttering, as they 
did so, yells and threats and abusive insults. 

The mass of the people behind, hearing these 
yells, and yielding to a steady pressure from the 
rear, where more and more inquisitive persons kept 
arriving, began to sway ominously onward, crowding 
more and more thickly around the open space, where 
Mr. Romer stood, angrily regarding them. 

The policemen kept looking anxiously towards the 
Half Moon where the road across the hill terminated. 
They were evidently very nervous and extremely de- 
sirous of the arrival of re-enforcements. No re- 
enforcements coming, however, and the destruction 
of property continuing, they were forced to act; and 
drawing their staves, they made a determined rush 



382 WOOD AND STONE 

upon the men attacking the shed. Had these persons 
not been already half-drunk, the emissaries of the 
law would, have come off badly. As it was, they 
only succeeded in flinging the rioters back a few 
paces. The whole crowd moved forward and a volley 
of stones and sticks compelled the officials to retreat. 
In their retreat they endeavoured to carry Mr. Romer 
with them, assuring him, in hurried gasps, that his 
life itself was in danger. "They'll knock your head 
off, sir — the scoundrels! Phil Wone has seen you." 

The pale son of Mr. Wone had indeed pushed his 
way to the front. He at once began an impassioned 
oration. 

"There he is — the devil himself!" he shouted, 
panting with excitement. "Do for him, friends! 
Throw him into one of his own pits — the blood- 
sucker, the assassin, the murderer of the people!" 

Wild memories of historic passages rushed through 
the young anarchist's brain. He waved his arms 
savagely, goading on his companions. His face was 
livid. Mr. Romer moved towards him, his head 
thrown back and a contemptuous smile upon his 
face. 

The drunken ring leaders, recognizing their heredi- 
tary terror — the local magistrate — reeled backwards 
in sudden panic. Others in the front line of the 
crowd, knowing Mr. Romer by sight, stood stock still 
and gaped foolishly or tried to shuffle off unobserved. 
A few strangers who were there, perceiving the pres- 
ence of a formidable-looking gentleman, assumed at 
once that he was Lord Tintinhull or the Earl of 
Glastonbury and made frantic efforts to escape. The 
crowd at the back, conscious that a reverse move- 



MORTIMER ROMER 383 

merit had begun, became alarmed. Cries were raised 
that the "military" had come. "They are going to 
fire!" shouted one voice, and several women screamed. 

Philip Wone lifted up his voice again, pointing 
with outstretched arm at his enemy, and calling upon 
the crowd to advance. 

"The serpent! — the devil-fish! — the bread-stealer! 
— the money-eater!" he yelled. "Cast him into his 
own pit, bury him in his own quarries!" 

It was perhaps fortunate for Mr. Romer at that 
moment that his adversary was this honest youth 
in place of a more hypocritical leader. An English 
crowd, even though sprinkled with a leaven of angry 
strikers, only grows puzzled and bewildered when 
it hears its enemy referred to as "devil-fish" and 
"assassin." 

The enemy at this moment took full advantage of 
their bewilderment. He deliberately drew out his 
cigarette-case and lighting a cigarette, made a gesture 
as if driving back a flock of sheep. The crowd 
showed further signs of panic. But the young anar- 
chist was not to be silenced. 

"Look round you, friends," he shouted. "Here is 
this man defying you on the very spot where you 
work for him day and night, where your descendants 
will work for his descendants day and night! What 
are you afraid of? This man did not make this hill 
bring forth stone, though it is stone, instead of bread, 
that he would willingly give your children!" 

Mr. Romer gave a sign to the policemen and ap- 
proached a step nearer. The cider-drinkers had 
already moved off. The crowd began to melt 
away. 



384 WOOD AND STONE 

"The very earth," went on the young man, "cries 
aloud to you to put an end to this tyranny! Do you 
realize that this is the actual place where in one grand 
revolt the men of Mid Wessex rose against the — " 

He was interrupted by a man behind him — a 
poacher from an outlying hamlet. "Chuck it, Phil 
Wone! Us knows all about this 'ere job." 

Mr. Romer raised his hand. The policemen seized 
the young man by the arms, one on either side. He 
seemed hardly to notice them, and went on in a loud 
resonant voice that rang across the valley. 

"It will end! It will end, this evil day! Already 
the new age is beginning. These robbers of the people 
had better make haste with their plundering, for the 
hour is approaching! Where is your priest?" — he 
struggled violently with his captors, turning towards 
the rapidly retreating crowd, "where is your vicar, 
— your curer of souls? He talks to you of submis- 
sion, and love, and obedience, and duty. What does 
this man care for these things? It is under this 
talk of "love" that you are betrayed! It is under 
this talk of "duty," that your children have the 
bread taken from their mouths! But the hour will 
come; — yes, you may smile," he addressed himself 
directly to Mr. Romer now, "but you will not smile 
for long. Your fate is already written down! It is 
as sure as this rain, — as sure as this storm!" 

He was silent, and making no further resistance, 
let himself be carried off by the two officials. 

The rain he spoke of was indeed beginning. Heavy 
drops, precursors of what seemed likely to be a 
tropical deluge, fell upon the broken wood-work, upon 
the half-burnt bracken, upon the slabs of Leonian 



MORTIMER ROMER 385 

stone, and upon the trampled grass. They also fell 
upon Mr. Romer's silver match-box as he selected 
another cigarette of his favourite brand, and walked 
slowly and smilingly away in the direction of Nevil- 
ton. 



CHAPTER XVI 
HULLAWAY 

I SEE," said Luke Andersen to his brother, as they 
sat at breakfast in the station-master's kitchen, 
about a fortnight after the riot on Leo's Hill, 
"I see that Romer has withdrawn his charge against 
young Wone. It seems that the magistrates set him 
free yesterday, on Romer's own responsibility. So 
the case will not come up at all. What do you make 
of that?" 

"He is a wiser man than I imagined," said James. 

"And that's not all!" cried his brother blowing the 
cigarette ashes from the open paper in front of him. 
"It appears the strike is in a good way of being 
settled by those damned delegates. We were idiots 
to trust them. I knew it. I told the men so. But 
they are all such hopeless fools. No doubt Romer 
has found some way of getting round them! The 
talk is now of arbitration, and a commissioner from 
the government. You mark my words, Daddy Jim, 
we shall be back working again by Monday." 

"But we shall get the chief thing we wanted, after 
all — if Lickwit is removed," said James, rising from 
the table and going to the window, "I know I shall 
be quite satisfied myself, if I don't see that rascal's 
face any more." 

"The poor wretch has collapsed altogether, so they 
said down at the inn last night," Luke put in. "My 



HULLAWAY 387 



belief is that Romer has now staked everything on 
getting into Parliament and is ready to do anything 
to propitiate the neighbourhood. If that's his line, 
he'll succeed. He'll out-manceuvre our friend Wone 
at every step. When a man of his type once tries 
the conciliatory game be becomes irresistible. That 
is what these stupid employers so rarely realize. No 
doubt that's his policy in stopping the process 
against Philip. He's a shrewd fellow this Romer — 
and I shouldn't wonder if, when the strike is settled, 
he became the most popular landlord in the country. 
Wone did for himself by sneaking off home that day, 
when things looked threatening. They were talking 
about that in Yeoborough. I shouldn't be surprised 
if it didn't lose him the election." 

"I hope not," said James Andersen gazing out of 
the window at the gathering clouds. "I should be 
sorry to see that happen." 

"I should be damned glad!" cried his brother, 
pushing back his chair and luxuriously sipping his 
final cup of tea. "My sympathies are all with Ro- 
mer in this business. He has acted magnanimously. 
He has acted shrewdly. I would sooner, any day, 
be under the control of a man like him, than see a 
sentimental charlatan like Wone get into Parliament." 

"You are unfair, my friend," said the elder brother, 
opening the lower sash of the window and letting in 
such a draught of rainy wind that he was immediately 
compelled to re-close it, "you are thoroughly unfair. 
Wone is not in the least a charlatan. He believes 
every word he says, and he says a great many things 
that are profoundly true. I cannot see," he went on, 
turning round and confronting his equable relative 



388 WOOD AND STONE 

with a perturbed and troubled face, "why you have 
got your knife into Wone in this extreme manner. 
Of course he is conceited and long-winded, but the 
man is genuinely sincere. I call him rather a pathetic 
figure." 

"He looked pathetic enough when he sneaked off 
after that riot, leaving Philip in the hands of the 
police." 

"It annoys me the way you speak," returned the 
elder brother, in growing irritation. "What right 
have you to call the one man's discretion cowardice, 
and the other's wise diplomacy? I don't see that it 
was any more cowardice for Wone to protest against 
a riot, than for Romer to back down before public 
opinion as he seems now to have done. Besides, 
who can blame a fellow for wanting to avoid a scene 
like that? I know you wouldn't have cared to en- 
counter those Yeoborough roughs." 

"Old Romer encountered them," retorted Luke. 
"They say he smoked a cigarette in their faces, and 
just waved them away, as if they were a cloud of 
gnats. I love a man who can do that sort of thing!" 

"That's right!" cried the elder brother growing 
thoroughly angry. "That's the true Yellow Press 
attitude! Here we have one of your 'still, strong 
men,' afraid of no mob on earth ! I know them — 
these strong men! Its easy enough to be calm and 
strong when you have a banking-account like Romer's, 
and all the police in the county on your side?" 

"Brother Lickwit will not forget that afternoon," 
remarked Luke, taking a rose from a vase on the 
table and putting it into his button-hole. 

"Yes, Lickwit is the scape-goat," rejoined the 



HULLAWAY 389 



other. "Lickwit will have to leave the place, broken 
in his nerves, and ruined in his reputation, while 
his master gets universal praise for magnanimity 
and generosity! That is the ancient trick of these 
crafty oppressors." 

"Why do you use such grand words, Daddy Jim?" 
said Luke smiling and stretching out his legs. "It's 
all nonsense, this talk about oppressors and oppressed. 
The world only contains two sorts of people — the 
capable ones and the incapable ones. I am all on the 
side of the capable ones!" 

"I suppose that is why you are treating little 
Annie Bristow so abominably!" cried James, losing 
all command of his temper. 

Luke made an indescribable grimace which con- 
verted his countenance in a moment from that of 
a gentle faun to that of an ugly Satyr. 

"Ho! ho!" he exclaimed, "so we are on that tack 
are we? And please tell me, most virtuous moralist, 
why I am any worse in my attitude to Annie, than 
you in your attitude to Ninsy? It seems to me we 
are in the same box over these little jobs." 

"Damn you!" cried James Andersen, walking 
fiercely up to his brother and trembling with rage. 

But Luke sipped his tea with perfect equanimity. 

"It's no good damning me," he said quietly. 
"That will not alter the situation. The fact remains, 
that both of us have found our little village-girls 
rather a nuisance. I don't blame you. I don't 
blame myself. These things are inevitable. They are 
part of the system of the universe. Little girls have 
to learn — as the world moves round — that they 
can't have everything they want. I don't know 



390 WOOD AND STONE 

whether you intend to marry Ninsy? I haven't the 
slightest intention of marrying Annie." 

"But you've been making love to her for the last 
two months! You told me so yourself when we met 
her at Hullaway!" 

"And you weren't so very severe then, were you, 
Daddy Jim? It's only because I have annoyed you 
this morning that you bring all this up. As a matter 
of fact, Annie is far less mad about me than Ninsy 
is about you. She's already flirting with Bob Granger. 
Anyone can see she's perfectly happy. She's been 
happy ever since she made a fool of me over Gladys' 
ring. As long as a girl knows she's put you in a 
ridiculous position, she'll very soon console herself. 
No doubt she'll make Granger marry her before the 
summer's over. Ninsy is quite a different person. 
Annie and I take our little affair in precisely the same 
spirit. I am no more to blame than she is. But 
Ninsy's case is different. Ninsy is seriously and 
desperately in love with you. And her invalid state 
makes the situation a much more embarrassing one. 
I think my position is infinitely less complicated than 
yours, brother Jim!" 

James Andersen's face became convulsed with 
fury. He stretched out his arm towards his brother, 
and extended a threatening fore-finger. 

"Young man," he cried, "I will never forgive you 
for this!" 

Having uttered these words he rushed incontinently 
out of the room, and, bare-headed as he was, pro- 
ceeded to stride across the fields, in a direction oppo- 
site from that which led to Nevilton. 

The younger brother shrugged his shoulders, 



HULLAWAY 391 



drained his tea-cup, and meditatively lit another 
cigarette. The stone-works being closed, he had all 
the day before him in which to consider this unfor- 
tunate rupture. At the present moment, however, 
all he did was to call their landlady — the station- 
master's buxom wife — and affably help her in the 
removal and washing up of the breakfast things. 

Luke was an adept in all household matters. His 
supple fingers and light feminine movements were 
equal to almost any task, and while occupied in such 
things his gay and humorous conversation made any 
companion of his labour an enviable person. Mrs. 
Round, their landlady, adored him. There was 
nothing she would not have done at his request; and 
Lizzie, Betty, and Polly, her three little daughters, 
loved him more than they loved their own father. 
Having concerned himself for more than an hour with 
these agreeable people, Luke took his hat and stick, 
and strolling lazily along the railroad-line railings, 
surveyed with inquisitive interest the motley group 
of persons who were waiting, on the further side, 
for the approach of a train. 

A little apart from the rest, seated on a bench 
beside a large empty basket, he observed the re- 
doubtable Mrs. Fringe. Between this lady and him- 
self there had existed for the last two years a sort 
of conspiracy of gossip. Like many other middle- 
aged women in Nevilton, Mrs. Fringe had made a 
pet and confidant of this attractive young man, who 
played, in spite of his mixed birth, a part almost 
analogous to that of an affable and ingratiating 
cadet of some noble family. 

He passed through the turn-stile, crossed the track, 



392 WOOD AND STONE 

and advanced slowly up the platform. His plump 
Gossip, observing him afar off, rose and moved to 
meet him, her basket swinging in her hand and a 
radiant smile upon her face. It was like an encounter 
between some Pantagruelian courtier and some co- 
lossal Gargamelle. They stood together, in the wind, 
at the extreme edge of the platform. Luke, who 
was dressed so well that it would have been im- 
possible to distinguish him from any golden youth 
from Oxford or Cambridge, whispered shameless 
scandal into the lady's ears, from beneath the shadow 
of his panama-hat. She on her side was equally 
confidential. 

"There was a pretty scene down our way last 
night," she said. "Miss Seldom came in with some 
books for my young Reverend and, Lord! they did 
have an ado. I heard 'un shouting at one another 
as though them were rampin' mad. My master 'ee 
were hollerin' Holy Scripture like as he were dazed, 
and the young lady she were answerin' 'im with God 
knows what. From all I could gather of it, that girl 
had got some devil's tale on Miss Gladys. 'Tweren't 
as though she did actually name her by name, as you 
might say, but she pulled her hair and scratched her 
like any crazy cat, sideways-like and cross-wise. It 
seems she'd got hold of some story about that foreign 
young woman and Miss Gladys having her knife into 
'er, but I saw well enough what was at the bottom 
of it and I won't conceal it from 'ee, my dear. She 
do want 'im for herself. That's the long and short. 
She do want 'im for herself!" 

"What were they disputing about?" asked Luke 
eagerly. "Did you hear their words?" 



HULLAWAY 393 



" 'Tis no good arstin' me about their words," 
replied Mrs. Fringe. "Those long- windy dilly-dallies 
do sound to me no more than the burbering of blow- 
flies. God save us from such words! I'm not a 
reading woman and I don't care who knows it. But 
I know when a wench is moon-daft on a fellow. I 
knows that, my dear, and I knows when she's got a 
tale on another girl!" 

"Did she talk about Catholicism to him?" enquired 
Luke. 

"I won't say as she didn't bring something of that 
sort in," replied his friend. "But 'twas Miss Gladys 
wot worried 'er. Any fool could see that. 'Tis my 
experience that when a girl and a fellow get hot on 
any of these dilly-dally argimints, there's always 
some other maid biding round the corner." 

"I've just had a row with James," remarked the 
stone-carver. "He's gone off in a fury over towards 
Hullaway." 

Mrs Fringe put down her basket and glanced up 
and down the platform. Then she laid her hand on 
the young man's arm. 

"I wouldn't say what I do now say, to anyone, but 
thee own self, dearie. And I wouldn't say it to thee 
if it hadn't been worriting me for some merciful long 
while. And what's more I wouldn't say it, if I didn't 
know what you and your Jim are to one another. 
'More than brothers,' is what the whole village do 
say of ye!" 

"Go on — go on — Mrs. Fringe!" cried Luke. 
"That curst signal's down, and I can hear the train." 

"There be other trains than wot run on them 
irons," pronounced Mrs. Fringe sententiously, "and 



394 WOOD AND STONE 

if you aren't careful, one such God Almighty's train 
will run over that brother of yours, sooner or later." 

Luke looked apprehensively up the long converging 
steel track. The gloom of the day and the ominous 
tone of his old gossip affected him very unpleasantly. 
He began to wish that there was not a deep muddy 
pond under the Hullaway elms. 

"What on earth do you mean?" he cried, adding 
impatiently, "Oh damn that train!" as a cloud of 
smoke made itself visible in the distance. 

"Only this, dearie," said the woman picking up 
her basket, "only this. If you listen to me you'd 
sooner dig your own grave than have words with 
brother. Brother be not one wot can stand these 
fimble-fambles same as you and I. I know wot I 
do say, cos I was privileged, under Almighty God, 
to see the end of your dear mother." 

"I know — I know — "cried the young man, "but 
what do you mean?" 

Mrs. Fringe thrust her arm through the handle of 
her basket and turned to meet the incoming train. 

" 'Twas when I lived with my dear husband down 
at Willow-Grove," she said. " 'Twas a stone's throw 
there from where you and Jim were born. I always 
feared he would go, same as she went, sooner or later. 
He talks like her. He looks like her. He treats a 
person in the way she treated a person, poor moon- 
struck darling! 'Twas all along of your father. She 
couldn't bide him along-side of her in the last days. 
And he knew it as well as you and I know it. But 
do 'ee think it made any difference to him? Not a 
bit, dearie! Not one little bit!" 

The train had now stopped, and with various 



HULLAWAY 395 



humorous observations, addressed to porters and 
passengers indiscriminately, Mrs. Fringe took her 
place in a carriage. 

Heedless of being overheard, Luke addressed her 
through the window of the compartment. "But 
what about James? What were you saying about 
James?" 

" 'Tis too long a tale to tell 'ee, dearie," murmured 
the woman breathlessly. "There be need now of all 
my blessed wits to do business for the Reverend." 
There, look at that!" She waved at him a crumpled 
piece of paper. "Beyond all thinking I've got to 
fetch him books from Slitly's. Books, by the Lord! 
As if he hadn't too many of the darned things for his 
poor brain already!" 

The engine emitted a portentious puff of smoke, and 
the train began to move. Luke walked by the side 
of his friend's window, his hand on the sash. 

"You think it is inadvisable to thwart my brother, 
then," he said, "in any way at all. You think I 
must humour him. You are afraid if I don't — " 
His walk was of necessity quickened into a run. 

"It's a long story, dearie, a long story. But I had 
the privilege under God Almighty of knowing your 
blessed mother when she was called, and I tell you it 
makes my heart ache to see James going along the 
same road as — " 

Her voice was extinguished by the noise of wheels 
and steam. Luke, exhausted, was compelled to relax 
his hold. The rest of the carriages passed him with 
accumulated speed and he watched the train dis- 
appear. In his excitement he had advanced far be- 
yond the limits of the platform. He found himself 



396 WOOD AND STONE 

standing in a clump of yellow rag-wort, just behind 
his own stone-cutter's shed. 

He gazed up the track, along which the tantalizing 
lady had been so inexorably snatched away. The 
rails had a dull whitish glitter but their look was 
bleak and grim. They suggested, in their narrow 
merciless perspective, cutting the pastures in twain, 
the presence of some remorseless mechanical Will 
carving its purpose, blindly and pitilessly, out of 
the innocent waywardness of thoughtless living 
things. 

An immense and indefinable foreboding passed, 
like the insertion of a cold, dead finger, through the 
heart of the young man. Fantastic and terrible 
images pursued one another through his agitated 
brain. He saw his brother lying submerged in 
Hullaway Pond, while a group of frightened chil- 
dren stood, in white pinafores, stared at him with 
gaping mouths. He saw himself arriving upon this 
scene. He even went so far as to repeat to himself 
the sort of cry that such a sight might naturally 
draw from his lips, his insatiable dramatic sense 
making use, in this way, of his very panic, to project 
its irrepressible puppet-show. His brother's words, 
"Young man, I will never forgive you for this," 
rose luridly before him. He saw them written along 
the edge of a certain dark cloud which hung threaten- 
ingly over the Hullaway horizon. He felt precisely 
what he would feel when he saw them — luminously 
phosphorescent — in the indescribable mud and green- 
ish weeds that surrounded his brother's dead face. 
A sickening sense of loss and emptiness went shiver- 
ing through him. He felt as though nothing in the 



HULLAWAY 397 



world was of the least importance except the life of 
James Andersen. 

With hurried steps he re-crossed the line, re-passed 
the turn-stile, and began following the direction 
taken by his brother just two hours before. Never 
had the road to Hullaway seemed so long! 

Half-way there, where the road took a devious 
turn, he left it, and entering the fields again, followed 
a vaguely outlined foot-path. This also betraying 
him, or seeming to betray him, by its departure 
from the straight route, he began crossing the mead- 
ows with feverish directness, climbing over hedges and 
ditches with the desperate pre-occupation of one 
pursued by invisible pursuers. The expression upon 
his face, as he hurried forward in this manner, was 
the expression of a man who has everything he values 
at stake. A casual acquaintance would never have 
supposed that the equable countenance of Luke An- 
dersen had the power to look so haggard, so drawn, 
so troubled. He struck the road again less than 
half a mile from his destination. Why he was so 
certain that Hullaway was the spot he sought, he 
could hardly have explained. It was, however, one 
of his own favourite walks on rainless evenings and 
Sunday afternoons, and quite recently he had several 
times persuaded his brother to accompany him. He 
himself was wont to haunt the place and its sur- 
roundings, because of the fact that, about a mile to 
the west of it, there stood an isolated glove-factory 
to which certain of the Nevilton girls were accustomed 
to make their way across the field-paths. 

Hullaway village was a very small place, consider- 
ably more remote from the world than Nevilton, and 



398 WOOD AND STONE 

attainable only by narrow lanes. The centre of it 
was the great muddy stagnant pond which now so 
dominated Luke's alarmed imagination. Near the 
pond was a group of elms, of immense antiquity, — 
many of them mere stumps of trees, — but all of 
them possessed of wide-spreading prominent roots, 
and deeply indented hollow trunks worn as smooth 
as ancient household furniture, by the constant 
fumbling and scrambling of generations of Hullaway 
children. 

The only other objects of interest in the place, were 
a small, unobtrusive church, built, like everything 
else in the neighborhood, of Leonian stone, and an 
ancient farm-house surrounded by a high manorial 
wall. Beneath one of the Hullaway Elms stood an 
interesting relic of a ruder age, in the shape of some 
well-worn stocks, now as pleasant a seat for rural 
gossips as they were formerly an unpleasant pillory 
for rural malefactors. 

As Luke Andersen approached this familiar spot he 
observed with a certain vague irritation the well- 
known figure of one of his most recent Nevilton 
enchantresses. The girl was no other, in fact, than 
that shy companion of Annie Bristow who had been 
amusing herself with them in the Fountain Square 
on the occasion of Mr. Clavering's ill-timed inter- 
vention. At this moment she was sauntering negli- 
gently along, on a high-raised path of narrow paved 
flag-stones, such paths being a peculiarity of Hulla- 
way, due to the prevalence of heavy autumn floods. 

The girl was evidently bound for the glove-factory, 
for she swung a large bundle as she walked, resting 
it idly every now and then, on any available wall or 



HULLAWAY 399 



rail or close-cut hedge, along which she passed. She 
was an attractive figure, tall, willowy, and lithe, and 
she walked in that lingering, swaying voluptuous 
manner which gives to the movements of maidens of 
her type a sort of provocative challenge. Luke, ad- 
vancing along the road behind her, caught himself 
admiring, in spite of his intense preoccupation, the 
alluring swing of her walk and the captivating lines 
of her graceful person. 

The moment was approaching that he had so fan- 
tastically dreaded, the moment of his first glance at 
Hullaway Great Pond. He was already relieved to 
see no signs of anything unusual in the air of the 
place, — but the imaged vision of his brother's 
drowned body still hovered before him, and that 
fatal "I'll never forgive you for this!" still rang in 
his ears. 

His mind all this while was working with extraor- 
dinary rapidity and he was fully conscious of the 
grotesque irrelevance of this lapse into the ingrained 
habit of wanton admiration. Quickly, in a flash of 
lightning, he reviewed all his amorous adventures and 
his frivolous philanderings. How empty, how bleak, 
how impossible, all such pleasures seemed, without 
the dark stooping figure of this companion of his 
soul as their taciturn background! He looked at 
Phyllis Santon with a sudden savage resolution, and 
made a quaint sort of vow in the depths of his heart. 

"I'll never speak to the wench again or look at her 
again," he said to himself, "if I find Daddy Jim safe 
and sound, and if he forgives me!" 

He hurried past her, almost at a run, and arrived 
at the centre of Hullaway. There was the Great 



400 WOOD AND STONE 

Pond, with its low white-washed stone parapet. There 
were the ancient elm-trees and the stocks. There 
also were the white-pinafored infants playing in the 
hollow aperture of the oldest among the trees. But 
the slimy surface of the water was utterly undisturbed 
save by two or three assiduous ducks who at intervals 
plunged beneath it. 

He drew an immense sigh of relief and glanced 
casually round. Phyllis had not failed to perceive 
him. With a shy little friendly smile she advanced 
towards him. His vow was already in some danger. 
He waved her a hasty greeting but did not take her 
hand. 

"You'd better put yourself into the stocks," he 
said, covering with a smile the brutality of his neglect, 
"until I come back! I have to find James." 

Leaving her standing in mute consternation, he 
rushed off to the churchyard on the further side of 
the little common. There was a certain spot here, 
under the shelter of the Manor wall, where Luke 
and his brother had spent several delicious afternoons, 
moralizing upon the quaint epitaphs around them, 
and smoking cigarettes. Luke felt as if he were 
almost sure to find James stretched out at length 
before a certain old tombstone whose queer appeal 
to the casual intruder had always especially attracted 
him. Both brothers had a philosophical mania for 
these sepulchral places, and the Hullaway graveyard 
was even more congenial to their spirit than the 
Nevilton one, perhaps because this latter was so 
dominatingly possessed by their own dead. 

Luke entered the enclosure through a wide-open 
wooden gate and glanced quickly round him. There 



HULLAWAY 401 



was the Manor wall, as mellow and sheltering as 
ever, even on such a day of clouds. There was their 
favourite tombstone, with its long inscription to the 
defunct seignorial house. But of James Andersen 
there was not the remotest sign. 

Where the devil had his angry brother gone? 
Luke's passionate anxiety began to give place to a 
certain indignant reaction. Why were people so 
ridiculous? These volcanic outbursts of ungoverned 
emotion on trifling occasions were just the things 
that spoiled the harmony and serenity of life. 
Where, on earth, could James have slipped off to? 
He remembered that they had more than once gone 
together to the King's Arms — the unpretentious 
Hullaway tavern. It was just within the bounds 
of possibility that the wanderer, finding their other 
haunts chill and unappealing, had taken refuge 
there. 

He recrossed the common, waved his hand to 
Phyllis, who seemed to have taken his speech quite 
seriously and was patiently seated on the stocks, and 
made his way hurriedly to the little inn. 

Yes — there, ensconced in a corner of the high settle, 
with a half-finished tankard of ale by his side, was 
his errant brother. 

James rose at once to greet him, showing complete 
friendliness, and very small surprise. He seemed to 
have been drinking more than his wont, however, 
for he immediately sank back again into his corner, 
and regarded his brother with a queer absent-minded 
look. 

Luke ordered a glass of cider and sat down close 
to him on the settle. 



402 WOOD AND STONE 

"I am sorry," he whispered, laying his hand on 
his brother's knee. "I didn't mean to annoy you. 
What you said was quite true. I treated Annie very 
badly. And Ninsy is altogether different. You'll 
forgive me, won't you, Daddy Jim?" 

James Andersen pressed his hand. "It's nothing," 
he said in rather a thick voice. "It's like everything 
else, its nothing. I was a fool. I am still a fool. 
But its better to be a fool than to be dead, isn't it? 
Or am I talking nonsense?" 

"As long as you're not angry with me any longer," 
answered Luke eagerly, "I don't care how you talk!" 

"I went to the churchyard — to our old place — 
you know," went on his brother. "I stayed nearly 
an hour there — or was it more? Perhaps it was 
more. I stayed so long, anyway, that I nearly went 
to sleep. I think I must have gone to sleep!" he 
added, after a moment's pause. 

"I expect you were tired," remarked Luke rather 
weakly, feeling for some reason or other, a strange 
sense of disquietude. 

"Tired?" exclaimed the recumbent man, "why 
should I be tired?" He raised himself up with a jerk, 
and finishing his glass, set it down with meticulous 
care upon the ground beside him. 

Luke noticed, with an uncomfortable sense of 
something not quite usual in his manner, that every 
movement he made and every word he spoke seemed 
the result of a laborious and conscious effort — like 
the effort of one in incomplete control of his sensory 
nerves. 

"What shall we do now?" said Luke with an air 
of ease and indifference. "Do you feel like strolling 



HULLAWAY 403 



back to Nevilton, or shall we make a day of it and 
go on to Roger-Town Ferry and have dinner there?" 

James gave vent to a curiously unpleasant laugh. 
"You go, my dear," he said, "and leave me where 
I am." 

Luke began to feel thoroughly uncomfortable. He 
once more laid his hand caressingly on his brother's 
knee. "You have really forgiven me?" he pleaded. 
"Really and truly?" 

James Andersen had again sunk back into a semi- 
comatose state in his corner. "Forgive?" he mut- 
tered, as though he found difficulty in understanding 
the meaning of the word, "forgive? I tell you its 
nothing." 

He was silent, and then, in a still more drowsy 
murmur, he uttered the word "Nothing" three or 
four times. Soon after this he closed his eyes and 
relapsed into a deep slumber. 

"Better leave 'un as 'un be," remarked the land- 
lord to Luke. "I've had my eye on 'un for this last 
'arf hour. 'A do seem mazed-like, looks so. Let 'un 
bide where 'un be, master. These be wonderful 
rumbly days for a man's head. 'Taint what 'ee's 
'ad, you understand; to my thinking, 'tis these thun- 
der-shocks wot 'ave worrited 'im." 

Luke nodded at the man, and standing up sur- 
veyed his brother gravely. It certainly looked as if 
James was settled in his corner for the rest of the 
morning. Luke wondered if it would be best to let 
him remain where he was, and sleep off his coma, or 
to rouse him and try and persuade him to return 
home. He decided to take the landlord's advice. 

"Very well," he said. "I'll just leave him for a 



404 WOOD AND STONE 

while to recover himself. You'll keep an eye to 
him, won't you, Mr. Titley? I'll just wander round a 
bit, and come back. May-be if he doesn't want to 
go home to dinner, we'll have a bite of something 
here with you." 

Mr. Titley promised not to let his guest out of his 
sight. "I know what these thunder-shocks be," he 
said. "Don't you worry, mister. You'll find 'un 
wonderful reasonable along of an hour or so. 'Tis 
the weather wot 'ave him floored 'im. The liquor 
'ee's put down wouldn't hurt a cat." 

Luke threw an affectionate glance at his brother's 
reclining figure and went out. The reaction from his 
exaggerated anxiety left him listless and unnerved. 
He walked slowly across the green, towards the group 
of elms. 

It was now past noon and the small children who 
had been loitering under the trees had been carried 
off to their mid-day meal. The place seemed en- 
tirely deserted, except for the voracious ducks in the 
mud of the Great Pond. He fancied at first that 
Phyllis Santon had disappeared with the children, and 
a queer feeling of disappointment descended upon 
him. He would have liked at least to have had the 
opportunity of refusing himself the pleasure of talk- 
ing to her! He approached the enormous elm under 
which stood the stocks. Ah! She was still there 
then, his little Nevilton acquaintance. He had not 
seen her sooner, because she was seated on the lowest 
roots of the tree, her knees against the stocks them- 
selves. 

"Hullo, child!" he found himself saying, while his 
inner consciousness told itself that he would just say 



HULLAWAY 405 



one word to her, so that her feelings should not be 
hurt, and then stroll off to the churchyard. "Why, 
you have fixed yourself in the very place where they 
used to make people sit, when they put them in the 
stocks!" 

"Have I?" said the girl looking up at him without 
moving. "'Tis curious to think of them days! They 
do say folks never tasted meat nor butter in them 
old times. I guess it's better to be living as we be." 

Luke's habitual tone of sentimental moralizing had 
evidently set the fashion among the maids of Nevilton. 
Girls are incredibly quick at acquiring the mental 
atmosphere of a philosopher who attracts them. The 
simple flattery of her adoption of his colour of thought 
made it still more difficult for Luke to keep his vow 
to the Spinners of Destiny. 

"Yes," he remarked pensively, seating himself on 
the stocks above her. "It is extraordinary, isn't it, 
to think how many generations of people, like you 
and me, have talked to one another here, in fine days 
and cloudy days, in winter and summer — and the 
same old pond and the same old elms listening to 
all they say?" 

"Don't say that, Luke dear," protested the girl, 
with a little apprehensive movement of her shoulders, 
and a tightened clasp of her hands round her knees. 
"I don't like to think of that! 'Tis lonesome enough 
in this place, mid-day, without thinking of them 
ghost-stories." 

"Why do you say ghost-stories?" inquired Luke. 
"There's nothing ghostly about that dirty old pond 
and there's nothing ghostly about these hollow trees 
— not now, any way." 



406 WOOD AND STONE 

"'Tis what you said about their listening, that 
seems ghostly-like to me," replied the girl. "I am 
always like that, you know. Sometimes, down home, 
I gets a grip of the terrors from staring at old Mr. 
Pratty's barn. 'Tis funny, isn't it? I suppose I was 
born along of Christmas. They say children born 
then are wonderful ones for fancying things." 

Luke prodded the ground with his cane and looked 
at her in silence. Conscious of a certain admira- 
tion in his look, for the awkwardness of her pose 
only enhanced the magnetic charm of her person, 
she proceeded to remove her hat and lean her head 
with a wistful abandonment against the rough bark 
of the tree. 

The clouds hung heavily over them, and it seemed 
that at any moment the rain might descend in 
torrents; but so far not a drop had fallen. Queer 
and mysterious emotions passed through Luke's 
mind. 

He felt in some odd way that he was at a turning- 
point in the tide of his existence. It almost seemed 
to him as though, silent and unmoving, under the 
roof of the little inn which he could see from where 
he sat, his brother was lying in the crisis of some 
dangerous fever. A movement, or gesture, or word, 
from himself might precipitate this crisis, in one 
direction or the other. 

The girl crouched at his feet became to him, as he 
gazed at her, something more than a mere amorous 
acquaintance. She became a type, a symbol — an 
incarnation of the formidable writing of that Mov- 
ing Finger, to which all flesh must bow. Her half- 
coquettish, half-serious apprehensions, about the 



HULLAWAY 407 



ghostliness of the things that are always listening, 
as the human drama works itself out in their dumb 
presence, affected him in spite of himself. The vil- 
lage of Hullaway seemed at that moment to have 
disappeared into space, and he and his companion 
to be isolated and suspended — remote from all ter- 
restial activities, and yet aware of some confused 
struggle between invisible antagonists. 

From the splashing ducks in the pond who, every 
now then, so ridiculously turned up their squat 
tails to the cloudy heavens, his eye wandered to the 
impenetrable expectancy of the stone path which 
bordered the muddy edge of the water. With the 
quick sense of one whose daily occupation was con- 
cerned with this particular stone, he began calculating 
how long that time-worn pavement had remained 
there, and how many generations of human feet, 
hurrying or loitering, had passed along it since it 
was first laid down. What actual men, he won- 
dered, had brought it there, from its resting-place, 
seons-old in the distant hill, and laid it where it 
now lay, slab by slab? 

From where he sat he could just observe, between 
a gap in the trees of the Manor-Farm garden, the 
extreme edge of that Leonian promontory. It seemed 
to him as though the hill were at that moment being 
swept by a storm of rain. He shivered a little at 
the idea of how such a sweeping storm, borne on a 
northern wind, would invade those bare trenches 
and unprotected escarpments. He felt glad that 
his brother had selected Hullaway rather than that 
particular spot for his angry retreat. 

With a sense of relief he turned his eyes once more 



408 WOOD AND STONE 

to the girl reclining below him in such a charming 
attitude. 

How absurd it was, he thought, to let these 
vague superstitions overmaster him! Surely it was 
really an indication of cowardice, in the presence of 
a hypothetical Fate, to make such fantastic vows 
as that which he had recently made. It was all 
part of the atavistic survival in him of that un- 
happy "conscience," which had done so much to 
darken the history of the tribes of men. It was 
like "touching wood" in honour of infernal deities! 
What was the use of being a philosopher — of being 
so deeply conscious of the illusive and subjective 
nature of all these scruples — if, at a crisis, one only 
fell back into such absurd morbidity? The vow he 
had registered in his mind an hour before, seemed to 
him now a piece of grotesque irrelevance — a lapse, 
a concession to weakness, a reversion to primitive 
inhibition. If it had been cowardice to make such 
a vow, it were a still greater cowardice to keep it. 

He rose from his seat on the stocks, and began idly 
lifting up and down the heavy wooden bar which 
surmounted this queer old pillory. He finally left 
the thing open and gaping; its semi-circular cavities 
ready for any offender. Moved by a sudden im- 
pulse, the girl leant back still further against the 
tree, and whimsically raising one of her little feet, 
inserted it into the aperture. Amused at her com- 
panion's interest in this levity, and actuated by a 
profound girlish instinct to ruflfle the situation by 
some startling caprice, she had no sooner got one 
ankle into the cavity thus prepared for it, than 
with a sudden effort she placed the other by its 



HULLAWAY 409 



side, and coyly straightening her skirts with her 
hands, looked up smiling into Luke's face. 

Thus challenged, as it were, by this wilful little 
would-be malefactor, Luke was mechanically com- 
pelled to complete her imprisonment. With a sud- 
den vicious snap he let down the enclosing bar. 

She was now completely powerless; for the most 
drastic laws of balance made it quite impossible that 
she could release herself. It thus became inevitable 
that he should slip down on the ground by her side, 
and begin teasing her, indulging himself in sundry 
innocent caresses which her helpless position made 
it difficult to resist. 

It was not long, however, before Phyllis, fearful 
of the appearance upon the scene of some of Hull- 
away's inhabitants, implored him to release her. 

Luke rose and with his hand upon the bar con- 
templated smilingly his fair prisoner. 

"Please be quick!" the girl cried impatiently. 
"I'm getting so stiff." 

"Shall I, or shan't I?" said Luke provokingly. 

The corner of the girl's mouth fell and her under- 
lip quivered. It only needed a moment's further 
delay to reduce her to tears. 

At that moment two interruptions occurred simul- 
taneously. From the door of the King's Arms 
emerged the landlord, and began making vehement 
signals to Luke; while from the corner of the road 
to Nevilton appeared the figures of two young ladies, 
walking briskly towards them, absorbed in earnest 
conversation. These simultaneous events were ob- 
served in varying ratio by the captive and her cap- 
tor. Luke was vaguely conscious of the two ladies 



410 WOOD AND STONE 

and profoundly agitated by the appearance of the 
landlord. Phyllis was vaguely conscious of the land- 
lord and was profoundly agitated by the appearance 
of the ladies. The young stone-carver gave a quick 
thoughtless jerk to the bar; and without waiting to 
see the result, rushed off towards the inn. The 
heavy block of wood, impelled by the impetus he 
had given it, swung upwards, until it almost reached 
the perpendicular. Then it descended with a crash. 
The girl had just time to withdraw one of her ankles. 
The other was imprisoned as hopeless as before. 

Phyllis was overwhelmed with shame and embar- 
rassment. She had in a moment recognized Gladys, 
and she felt as those Apocalyptic unfortunates in 
Holy Scripture are reported as feeling when they 
call upon the hills to cover them. 

It had happened that Ralph Dangelis had been 
compelled to pay a flying visit to London on business 
connected with his proposed marriage. The two 
cousins, preoccupied, each of them, with their sep- 
arate anxieties, had wandered thus far from home 
to escape the teasing fussiness of Mrs. Romer, who 
with her preparations for the double wedding gave 
neither of them any peace. 

They approached quite near to the group of elms 
before either of them observed the unfortunate 
Phyllis. 

"Why!" cried Gladys suddenly to her compan- 
ion. "There's somebody in the stocks!" 

She went forward hastily, followed at a slower 
pace by the Italian. Poor Phyllis, her bundle by 
her side, and her cheeks tear-stained, presented a 
woeful enough appearance. Her first inclination was 



HULLAWAY 411 



to hide her face in her hands; but making a brave 
effort, she turned her head towards the new-comers 
with a gasping little laugh. 

"I put my foot in here for a joke," she stammered, 
"and it got caught. Please let me out, Miss Romer." 

Gladys came quite near and laid her gloved hand 
upon the wooden bar. 

"It just lifts up, Miss," pleaded Phyllis, with 
tears in her voice. "It isn't at all heavy." 

Gladys stared at her with a growing sense of in- 
terest. The girl's embarrassment under her scru- 
tiny awoke her Romer malice. 

"I really don't know that I want to let you out 
in such a hurry," she said. "If it's a game you are 
playing, it would be a pity to spoil it. Who put you 
in? You must tell me that, before I set you free! 
You couldn't have done it yourself." 

By this time Lacrima had arrived on the scene. 

The shame-faced Phyllis turned to her. "Please, 
Miss Traffio, please, lift that thing up! It's quite 
easy to move." 

The Italian at once laid her hands upon the block 
of wood and struggled to raise it; but Gladys had 
no difficulty in keeping the bar immoveable. 

"What are you doing?" cried the younger girl 
indignantly. "Take your arm away!" 

"She must tell us first who put her where she is," 
reiterated Miss Romer. "I won't have her let out 
'till she tells us that!" 

Phyllis looked piteously from one to the other. 
Then she grew desperate. 

"It was Luke Andersen," she whispered. 

"What!" cried Gladys. "Luke? Then he's been 



412 WOOD AND STONE 

out walking with you? Has he? Has he? Has 
he?" 

She repeated these words with such concentrated 
fury that Phyllis began to cry. But the shock of this 
information gave Lacrima her chance. Using all her 
strength she lifted the heavy bar and released the 
prisoner. Phyllis staggered to her feet and picked 
up her bundle. Lacrima handed the girl her hat 
and helped her to brush the dust from her clothes. 

"So you are Luke's latest fancy are you?" 
Gladys said scowling fiercely at the glove-maker. 

The pent-up feelings of the young woman broke 
forth at once. Moving a step or two away from 
them and glancing at a group of farm-men who were 
crossing the green, she gave full scope to her revenge. 

"I'm only Annie Bristow's friend," she retorted. 
"Annie Bristow is going to marry Luke. They are 
right down mad on one another." 

"It's a lie!" cried Gladys, completely forgetting 
herself and looking as if she could have struck the 
mocking villager. 

"A lie, eh?" returned the other. "Tisn't for me 
to tell the tale to a young lady, the likes of you. 
But we be all guessing down in Mr. North's factory, 
who 'twas that gave Luke the pretty lady-like ring 
wot he lent to Annie!" 

Gladys became livid with anger. "What ring?" 
she cried. "Why are you talking about a ring?" 

"Annie, she stuck it, for devilry, into that hole in 
Splash-Lane stone. She pushed it in, tight as 'twere 
a sham diamint. And there it do bide, the lady's 
pretty ring, all glittery and shiny, at bottom of that 
there hole! We maids do go to see 'un glinsying 



HULLAWAY 413 



and gleaming. It be the talk of the place, that ring 
be! Scarce one of the childer but 'as 'ad its try to 
hook 'un out. But 'tis no good. I guess Annie 
must have rammed it down with her mother's girt 
skewer. 'Tis fast in that stone anyway, for all the 
world to see. Folks, maybe, '11 be coming from 
Yeoborough, long as a few days be over, to see the 
lady's ring, wot Annie threw'd away, 'afore she said 
'yes' to her young man!" 

These final words were positively shouted by the 
enraged Phyllis, as she tripped away, swinging her 
bundle triumphantly. 

It seemed for a moment as though Gladys medi- 
tated a desperate pursuit, and the infliction of phys- 
ical violence upon her enemy. But Lacrima held 
her fast by the hand. "For heaven's sake, cousin," 
she whispered, "let her go. Look at those men 
watching us!" 

Gladys turned; but it was not at the farm-men 
she looked. 

Across the green towards them came the two 
Andersens, Luke looking nervous and worried, and 
his brother gesticulating strangely. The girls re- 
mained motionless, neither advancing to meet them 
nor making any attempt to evade them. Gladys 
seemed to lose her defiant air, and waited their 
approach, rather with the look of one expecting to 
be chidden than of one prepared to chide. On all 
recent occasions this had been her manner, when in 
the presence of the young stone-carver. 

The sight of Lacrima seemed to exercise a magical 
effect upon James Andersen. He ceased at once his 
excited talk, and advancing towards her, greeted 



414 WOOD AND STONE 

her in his normal tone — a tone of almost paternal 
gentleness. 

"It is nearly a quarter to one," said Gladys, 
addressing both the men. "Lacrima and I'll have 
all we can do to get back in time for lunch. Let's 
walk back together!" 

Luke looked at his brother who gave him a friendly 
smile. He also looked sharply at the Hullaway la- 
bourers, who were shuffling off towards the barton of 
the Manor-Farm. 

"I don't mind," he said; "though it is a danger- 
ous time of day! But we can go by the fields, and 
you can leave us at Roandyke Barn." 

They moved off along the edge of the pond to- 
gether. 

"It was Lacrima, not I, Luke," said Gladys pres- 
ently, "who let that girl out." 

Luke flicked a clump of dock-weeds with his cane. 
"It was her own fault," he said carelessly. "I 
thought I'd opened the thing. I was called away 
suddenly." 

Gladys bowed her head submissively. In the 
company of the young stone-carver her whole nature 
seemed to change. A shrewd observer might even 
have marked a subtle difference in her physical 
appearance. She appeared to wilt and droop, like 
a tropical flower transplanted into a northern 
zone. 

They remained all together until they reached the 
fields. Then Gladys and Luke dropped behind. 

"I have something I want to tell you," said the 
fair girl, as soon as the others were out of hearing. 
"Something very important." 



HULLAWAY 415 



"I have something to tell you too," answered 
Luke, "and I think I will tell it first. It is hardly 
likely that your piece of news can be as serious as 
mine." 

They paused at a stile; and the girl made him take 
her in his arms and kiss her, before she consented to 
hear what he had to say. 

It would have been noticeable to any observer that 
in the caresses they exchanged, Luke played the per- 
functory, and she the passionate part. She kissed 
him thirstily, insatiably, with clinging lips that 
seemed avid of his very soul. When at last they 
moved on through grass that was still wet with the 
rain of the night before, Luke drew his hand away 
from hers, as if to emphasize the seriousness of his 
words. 

"I am terribly anxious, dearest, about James," 
he said. "We had an absurd quarrel this morning, 
and he rushed off to Hullaway in a rage. I found 
him in the inn. He had been drinking, but it was 
not that which upset him. He had not taken enough 
to affect him in that way. I am very, very anxious 
about him. I forget whether I've ever told you 
about my mother? Her mind — poor darling — was 
horribly upset before she died. She suffered from 
more than one distressing mania. And my fear is 
that James may go the same way.' 

Gladys hung her head. In a strange and subtle 
way she felt as though the responsibility of this new 
catastrophe rested upon her. Her desperate passion 
for Luke had so unnerved her, that she had become 
liable to be victimized by any sort of superstitious 
apprehension. 



416 WOOD AND STONE 

"How dreadful!" she whispered, "but he seemed to 
me perfectly natural just now." 

"That was Lacrima's doing," said Luke. "Lac- 
rima is at the bottom of it all. I wish, oh, I wish, 
she was going to marry James, instead of that uncle 
of yours." 

"Father would never allow that," said Gladys, 
raising her head. "He is set upon making her take 
uncle John. It has become a kind of passion with 
him. Father is funny in these things." 

"Still — it might be managed," muttered Luke 
thoughtfully, "if we carried it through with a high 
hand. We might arrange it; the world is malleable, 
after all. If you and I, my dear, put our heads 
together, Mr. John Goring might whistle for his 
bride." 

"I hate Lacrimal" cried Gladys, with a sudden 
access of her normal spirit. 

"I don't care two pence about Lacrima," returned 
Luke. "It is of James I am thinking." 

"But she would be happy with James, and I don't 
want her to be happy." 

"What a little devil you are!" exclaimed the stone- 
carver, slipping his arm round her waist. 

"Yes, I know I am," she answered shamelessly. 
"I suppose I inherit it from father. He hates people 
just like that. But I am not a devil with you, 
Luke, am I? I wish I were!" she added, after a little 
pause. 

"We must think over this business from every 
point of view," said Luke solemnly. "I cannot 
help thinking that if you and I resolve to do it, we 
can twist the fates round, somehow or another. I 



HULLAWAY 417 



am sure Lacrima could save James if she liked. If 
you could only have seen the difference between 
what he was when I was called back to him just now, 
and what he became as soon as he set eyes upon 
her, you would know what I mean. He is mad 
about her, and if he doesn't get her, he'll go really 
mad. He was a madman just now. He nearly 
frightened that fool Titley into a fit." 

"I don't want Lacrima to marry James," burst 
out Gladys. Luke in a moment drew his arm away, 
and quickened his pace. 

"As you please," he said. "But I can promise 
you this, my friend, that if anything does happen to 
my brother, it'll be the end of everything between 
us." 

"Why — what — how can you say such dreadful 
things?" stammered the girl. 

Luke airily swung his stick. "It all rests with 
you, child. Though we can't marry, there's no 
reason why we shouldn't go on seeing each other, 
as we do now, forever and ever, — as long as you 
help me in this affair. But if you're going to sulk 
and talk this nonsense about 'hating' — it is prob- 
able that it will be a case of good-bye!" 

The fair girl's face was distorted by a spasmodic 
convulsion of conflicting emotions. She bit her lip 
and hung her head. Presently she looked up again 
and flung her arms round his neck. "I'll do any- 
thing you ask me, Luke, anything, as long as you 
don't turn against me." 

They walked along for some time in silence, hand 
in hand, taking care not to lose sight of their two 
companions who seemed as engrossed as themselves 



418 WOOD AND STONE 

in one another's society. James Andersen was show- 
ing sufficient discretion in avoiding the more fre- 
quented foot-paths. 

"Luke", began the girl at last, "did you really 
give my ring to Annie Santon?" 

"Luke's brow clouded in a moment. "Damn 
your ring!" he cried harshly. "I've got other things 
to think about now than your confounded rings. 
When people give me presents of that kind," he added 
"I take for granted I can do what I like with 
them." 

Gladys trembled and looked pitfully into his face. 

"But that girl said," she murmured — "that fac- 
tory girl, I mean — that it had been lost in some way; 
hidden, she said, in some hole in a stone. I can't 
believe that you would let me be made a laughing- 
stock of, Luke dear?" 

"Oh, don't worry me about that," replied the 
stone-carver. "Maybe it is so, maybe it isn't so; 
anyway it doesn't matter a hang." 

"She said too," pleaded Gladys in a hesitating 
voice, "that you and Annie were going to be mar- 
ried." 

"Ho! ho!" laughed Luke, fumbling with some 
tightly tied hurdles that barred their way; "so she 
said that, did she? She must have had her knife 
into you, our little Phyllis. Well, and what's to 
stop me if I did decide to marry Annie?" 

Gladys gasped and looked at him with a drawn 
and haggard face. Her beauty was of the kind that 
required the flush of buoyant spirits to illuminate it. 
The more her heart ached, the less attractive she 
became. She was anything but beautiful now; and, 



HULLAWAY 419 



as he looked at her, Luke noticed for the first time, 
how low her hair grew upon her forehead. 

"You wouldn't think of doing that?" she whis- 
pered, in a tone of supplication. He laughed lightly 
and lifting up her chin made as though he were 
going to kiss her, but drew back without doing so. 

"Are you going to be good," he said, "and help 
me to get Lacrima for James?" 

She threw her arms round him. "I'll do anything 
you like — anything," she repeated, "if you'll only 
let me love you!" 

While this conversation was proceeding between 
these two, a not less interesting clash of divergent 
emotions was occurring between their friends. The 
Italian may easily be pardoned if she never for one 
second dreamed of the agitation in her companion's 
mind that had so frightened Luke. James' manner 
was" in no way different from usual, and though he 
expressed his feelings in a more unreserved fashion 
than he had ever done before, Lacrima had been for 
many weeks expecting some such outbreak. 

"Don't be angry with me," he was saying, as he 
strode by her side. "I had meant never to have 
told you of this. I had meant to let it die with me, 
without your ever knowing, but somehow — today — I 
could not help it." 

He had confessed to her point blank, and in simple, 
unbroken words, the secret of his heart, and La- 
crima had for some moments walked along with head 
averted making no response. 

It would not be true to say that this revelation 
surprised her. It would be completely untrue to say 
it offended her. It did not even enter her mind that 



420 WOOD AND STONE 

it might have been kinder to have been less friendly, 
less responsive, than she had been, to this queer 
taciturn admirer. But circumstances had really 
given her very little choice in the matter. She had 
been, as it were, flung perforce upon his society, and 
she had accepted, as a providential qualification of 
her loneliness, the fact that he was attracted towards 
her rather than repelled by her. 

It is quite possible that had he remained untouched 
by the evasive appeal of her timid grace; had he, 
for instance, remained a provocative and impene- 
trable mystery at her side, she might have been led 
to share his feelings. But, unluckily for poor Ander- 
sen, the very fact that his feelings had been dis- 
closed only too clearly, militated hopelessly against 
such an event. He was no remote, shadowy, roman- 
tic possibility to her — a closed casket of wonders, 
difficult and dangerous to open. He was simply a 
passionate and assiduous lover. The fact that he 
could love her, lowered him a little in Lacrima's 
esteem. True to her Pariah instincts she felt that 
such passion was a sign of weakness in him; and if she 
did not actually despise him for it, it materially lessened 
the interest she took in the workings of his mind. 
Maurice Quincunx drew her to him for the very reason 
that he was so sexless, so cold, so wayward, so full of 
whimsical caprices. Maurice, a Pariah himself, excited 
at the same time her maternal tenderness and her 
imaginative affection. If she did not feel the passion 
for him that she might have felt for Andersen, had 
Andersen remained inacessible; that was only because 
there was something in Maurice's peculiar egoism 
which chilled such feelings at their root. 



HULLAWAY 421 



Another almost equally effective cause of her lack 
of response to the stone-carver's emotion was the 
cynical and world-deep weariness that had fallen upon 
her, since this dreadful marriage with Goring had be- 
come a settled event. Face to face with this, she 
felt as though nothing mattered very much, and as 
though any feeling she herself might excite in another 
person must needs be like the passing of a shadow 
across a mirror — something vague, unreal, insub- 
stantial — something removed to a remote distance, 
like the voice of a person at the end of a long 
tunnel, or as the dream of someone who is himself a 
figure in a dream. If anyone, she felt, broke into 
the enchanted circle that surrounded her, it was as if 
they sought to make overtures to a person dead and 
buried. 

It was almost with the coldness and detachment of 
the dead that she now answered him, and her voice 
went sighing across the wet fields with a desolation 
that would have struck a more normal mind than 
Andersen's as the incarnation of tragedy. He was 
himself, however, strung up to such a tragic note, 
that the despair in her tone affected him less than it 
would have affected another. 

"I have come to feel," said she, "that I have no 
heart, and I feel as though this country of yours 
had no heart. It ought to be always cloudy and dark 
in this place. Sunshine here is a kind of bitter 
mockery." 

"You do not know — you do not know what you 
say," cried the poor stone-carver, quickening his 
pace in his excitement so that it became difficult for 
her to keep up with him. "I have loved you, since I 



422 WOOD AND STONE 

first saw you — that day — down at our works — when 
the hawthorn was out. My heart at any rate is 
deep enough, deep enough to be hurt more than you 
would believe, Lacrima. Oh, if things were only 
different! If you could only bring yourself to care 
for me a little — just a little! Lacrima, listen to me." 

He stopped abruptly in the middle of a field and made 
her turn and face him. He laid his hand solemnly 
and imploringly upon her wrist. "Why need you 
put yourself under this frightful yoke? I know 
something of what you have had to go through. I 
know something, though it may be only a little, of 
what this horrible marriage means to you. Lacrima, 
for your own sake — as well as mine — for the sake of 
everyone who has ever cared for you — don't let them 
drag you into this atrocious trap. 

"Trust me, give yourself boldly into my care. 
Let's go away together and try our fortune in some 
new place! All places are not like Nevilton. I am a 
strong man, I know my trade, I could earn money 
easily to keep us both. Lacrima, don't turn away, 
don't look so helpless! After all, things might be 
worse, you might be already married to that man, 
and be buried alive forever! It is not yet too late. 
You are still free. I beg and implore you, by every- 
thing you hold sacred, to stop and escape before it is 
too late. It doesn't matter that you don't love me 
now. As long as you don't utterly hate me all can 
be put right. I don't ask you to return what I feel 
for you. I won't ask it if you agree to marry me. 
I'll make any contract with you you please, and 
swear any vow. I won't come near you when we are 
together. We can live under one roof as brother 



HULLAWAY 423 



and sister. The wedding-ring will be nothing be- 
tween us. It will only protect you from the rest of 
the world. I won't interfere with your life at all, 
when once I have freed you from this devil's hole. 
It will only be a marriage in form, in name; every- 
thing else will be just as you please. I will obey 
your least wish, your least fancy. If you want to 
go back to your own country and to go alone, I will 
save up money enough to make that possible. In 
fact, I have now got money enough to pay your 
journey and I would send out more to you. Lacrima, 
let me help you to break away from all this. You 
must, Lacrima, you must and you shall! If you 
prefer it, we needn't ever be married. I don't want 
to take advantage of you. I'll give you every 
penny I have and help you out of the country and 
then send you more as I earn it. It is madness, 
this devilish marriage they are driving you into. It 
is madness and folly to submit to it. It is monstrous. 
It is ridiculous. You are free to go, they have no 
hold upon you. Lacrima, Lacrima! why are you so 
cruel to yourself, to me, to everyone who cares for 

you?" 

He drew breath at last, but continued to clutch 
her wrist with a trembling hand, glancing anxiously, 
as he waited, at the lessening distance that separated 
them from the others. 

Lacrima looked at him with a pale troubled face, 
but her large eyes were full of tears and when she 
spoke her voice quivered. 

"I was wrong, my friend, to say that none of you 
here had any heart. Your heart is large and noble. 
I shall never — never forget what you have now said 



424 WOOD AND STONE 

to me. But James — but James, dear," and her voice 
shook still more, "I cannot, I cannot do it. There 
are more reasons than I can explain to you, why 
this thing must happen. It has to happen, and we 
must bow our heads and submit. After all, life is 
not very long, or very happy, at the best. Probably," 
— and she smiled a sad little smile, — "I should disap- 
point you frightfully if we did go together. I am 
not such a nice person as you suppose. I have queer 
moods — oh, such strange, strange moods! — and I know 
for certain that I should not make you happy. 

"Shall I tell you a horrible secret, James?" Here 
her voice sank into a curious whisper and she laughed 
a low distressing laugh. "I have really got the soul, 
the soul I say, not the nerves or sense, of a girl who 
has lost everything, — I wish I could make you under- 
stand — who has lost self-respect and everything, — 
I have thought myself into this state. I don't care 
now — I really don't — what happens to me. James, 
dear — you wouldn't want to marry a person like that, 
a person who feels herself already dead and buried? 
Yes, and worse than dead! A person who has lost 
all pity, all feeling, even for herself. A person who 
is past even caring for the difference between right 
and wrong! You wouldn't want to be kind to a 
person like that, James, would you?" 

She stopped and gazed into his face, smiling a woe- 
ful little smile. Andersen mechanically noticed that 
their companions had observed their long pause, and 
had delayed to advance, resting beneath the shelter 
of a wind-tossed ash-tree. The stone-carver began 
to realize the extraordinary and terrible loneliness 
of every human soul. Here he was, face to face 



HULLAWAY 425 



with the one being of all beings whose least look or 
word thrilled him with intolerable excitement, and 
yet he could not as much as touch the outer margin 
of her real consciousness. 

He had not the least idea, even at that fatal mo- 
ment, what her inner spirit was feeling; what thoughts, 
what sensations, were passing through her soul. Nor 
could he ever have. They might stand together thus, 
isolated from all the world, through an eternity of 
physical contact, and he would never attain such 
knowledge. She would always remain aloof, mys- 
terious, evasive. He resolved that at all events as 
far as he himself was concerned, there should be no 
barrier between them. He would lay open to her 
the deepest recesses of his heart. 

He began a hurried incoherent history of his pas- 
sion, of its growth, its subtleties, its intensity. He 
tried to make her realize what she had become for 
him, how she rilled every hour of every day with her 
image. He explained to her how clearly and fully 
he understood the difficulty, the impossibility, of his 
ever bringing her to care for him as he cared for 
her. 

He even went so far as to allude to Mr. Quincunx, 
and implored her to believe that he would be well 
content if she would let him earn money enough to 
support both her and Maurice, either in Nevilton or 
elsewhere, if it would cut the tragic knot of her fate 
to join her destiny to that of the forlorn recluse. 

It almost seemed as though this final stroke of 
self-abnegation excited more eloquence in him than 
all the rest. He begged and conjured her to cut 
boldly loose from the Romer bonds, and marry her 



426 WOOD AND STONE 

queer friend, if he, rather than any other, were the 
choice she made. His language became so vehe- 
ment, his tone so impassioned and exalted, that the 
girl began to look apprehensively at him. Even 
this apprehension, however, was a thing strangely 
removed from reality. His reckless words rose and 
fell upon the air and mixed with the rising wind as 
if they were words remembered from some previous 
existence. The man's whole figure, his gaunt frame, 
his stooping shoulders, his long arms and lean fingers, 
seemed to her like something only half-tangible, 
something felt and seen through a dim medium of 
obscuring mist. 

Lacrima felt vaguely as though all this were hap- 
pening to someone else, to someone she had read 
about in a book, or had known in remote childhood. 
The over-hanging clouds, the damp grass, the dis- 
tant ash-tree with the forms of their friends beneath 
it, all these things seemed to group themselves in 
her mind, as if answering to some strange dramatic 
story, which was not the story of her life at all, but 
of some other harassed and troubled spirit. 

In the depths of her mind she shrank away 
half- frightened and half-indifferent from this man's 
impassioned pleading and heroic proposals. The hu- 
morously cynical image of the hermit of Dead Man's 
Lane crossed her mental vision as a sort of wavering 
Pharos light in the dreamy twilight of her conscious- 
ness. How well she knew with what goblin-like 
quiver of his nostrils, with what sardonic gleam of 
his eyes, he would have listened to his rival's exalted 
rhetoric. 

In some strange way she felt amost angry with 



HULLAWAY 427 



this bolder, less cautious lover, for being what her 
poor nervous Maurice never could be. She caught 
herself shuddering at the thought of the drastic 
effort, the stern focussing of will-power which the 
acceptance of any one of his daring suggestions would 
imply. Perhaps, who can say, there had come to 
be a sort of voluptuous pleasure in thus lying back 
upon her destiny and letting herself be carried for- 
ward, at the caprice of other wills than her own. 

Mingled with these other complex reactions, there 
was borne in upon her, as she listened to him, a 
queer sense of the absolute unimportance of the 
whole matter. The long strain upon her nerves, of 
her sojourn in Nevilton House, had left her physi- 
cally so weary that she lacked the life-energy to sup- 
ply the life-illusion. The ardour and passion of 
Andersen's suggestions seemed, for all their dramatic 
pathos, to belong to a world she had left — a world 
from which she had risen or sunk so completely, that 
all return was impossible. Her nature was so hope- 
lessly the true Pariah-nature, that the idea of the 
effort implied in any struggle to escape her doom, 
seemed worse than the doom itself. 

This inhibition of any movement of effective re- 
sistance in the Pariah-type is the thing that normal 
temperaments find most difficult of all to under- 
stand. It would seem almost incredible to a healthy 
minded person that Lacrima should deliberately let 
herself be driven into such a fate without some last 
desperate struggle. Those who find it so, however, 
under-estimate that curious passion of submission 
from which these victims of circumstance suffer, a 
passion of submission which is itself, in a profoundly 



428 WOOD AND STONE 

subtle way, a sort of narcotic or drug to the wretch- 
edness they pass through. 

"I cannot do it," she repeated in a low tired voice, 
"though I think it's generous, beyond description, 
what you want to do for me. But I cannot do it. 
It's difficult somehow to tell you why, James dear; 
there are certain things that are hard to say, even 
to people that we love as much as I love you. For 
I do love you, in spite of everything. I hope you 
realize that. And I know that you have a deep 
noble heart." 

She looked at him with wistful and appealing 
tenderness, and let her little fingers slip into his 
feverish hand. 

When she said the words, "I do love you," a shiv- 
ering ecstasy shot through the stone-carver's veins, 
followed by a ghastly chilliness, like the hand of 
death, as he grasped their complete meaning. The 
most devastating tone, perhaps, of all, for an im- 
passioned lover to hear, is that particular tone of 
calm tender affection. It has the power of closing 
up vistas of hope more effectively than the expres- 
sion of the most vigorous repulsion. There was a 
ring of weary finality in her voice that echoed through 
his mind, like the tread of coffin-bearers through a 
darkened passage. Things had reached their hope- 
less point, and the two were standing mute and 
silent, in the attitude of persons taking a final fare- 
well of one another, when a noisy group of village 
maids, on their dilatory road to the glove-factory, 
made their voices audible from the further side of 
the nearest hedge. 

They both turned instantaneously to see how this 



HULLAWAY 429 



danger of discovery affected their friends, and neither 
of them was surprised to note that the younger 
Andersen had left his companion and was strolling 
casually in the direction of the voices. As soon as 
he saw that they had observed this manoeuvre he 
began beckoning to James. 

"We'd better separate, my friend," whispered 
Lacrima hastily. "I'll go back to Gladys. She and 
I must take the lane way and you and Luke the 
path by the barn. We'll meet again before — before 
anything happens." 

They separated accordingly and as the two girls 
passed through the gate that led into the Nevilton 
road, they could distinctly hear, across the fields, 
the ringing laughter of the high-spirited glove-makers 
as they chaffed and rallied the two stone-carvers 
through the thick bramble hedge which intervened 
between them. 



CHAPTER XVII 

SAGITTARIUS 

THE summer of the year whose events, in so far 
as they affected a certain little group of Nevil- 
ton people we are attempting to describe, 
seemed, to all concerned, to pass more and more 
rapidly, as the days began again to shorten. July 
gave place to August, and Mr. Goring's men were 
already at work upon the wheat-harvest. In the 
hedges appeared all those peculiar signals of the 
culmination of the season's glory, which are, by one 
of nature's most emphatic ironies, the signals also of 
its imminent decline. 

Old-man's-beard, for instance, hung its feathery 
clusters on every bush; and, in shadier places, white 
and black briony twined their decorative leaves and 
delicate flowers. The blossom of the blackberry 
bushes was already giving place to unripe fruit, and 
the berries of traveller's-joy were beginning to turn 
red. Hips and haws still remained in that vague 
colourless state which renders them indistinguishable 
to all eyes save those of the birds, but the juicy 
clusters of the common night-shade — " green grapes 
of Proserpine " — greeted the wanderer with their 
poisonous Circe-like attraction, from their thrones of 
dog-wood and maple, and whispered of the autumn's 
approach. In dry deserted places the scarlet splen- 
dour of poppies was rapidly yielding ground to all 



SAGITTARIUS 431 

those queer herbal plants, purplish or whitish in hue — 
the wild hyssop, or marjoram, being the most notice- 
able of them — which more than anything else denote 
the coming on of the equinox. From dusty heaps of 
rubbish the aromatic daisy-like camomile gave forth 
its pungent fragrance, and in damper spots the tall 
purple heads of hemp-agrimony flouted the dying 
valerian. 

An appropriate date at the end of the month had 
been fixed for the episcopal visit to Nevilton; and 
the candidates for confirmation were already begin- 
ning, according to their various natures and tempera- 
ments, to experience that excited anticipation, which, 
even in the dullest intelligence, such an event arouses. 

The interesting ceremony of Gladys Romer's bap- 
tism had been fixed for a week earlier than this, 
a fanciful sentiment in the agitated mind of Mr. 
Clavering having led to the selection of this parti- 
cular day on the strange ground of its exact coinci- 
dence with the anniversary of a certain famous saint. 

The marriage of Gladys with Dangelis, and of 
Lacrima with John Goring, was to take place early 
in September, Mrs. Romer having stipulated for 
reasons of domestic economy that the two events 
should be simultaneous. 

Another project of some importance to at least 
three persons in Nevilton, was now, as one might 
say, in the air; though this was by no means a 
matter of public knowledge. I refer to Vennie Sel- 
dom's fixed resolution to be received into the Cath- 
olic Church and to become a nun. 

Ever since her encounter in the village street with 
the loquacious Mr. Wone, Vennie had been oppressed 



432 WOOD AND STONE 

by an invincible distaste for the things and people 
that surrounded her. Her longing to give the world 
the slip and devote herself completely to the reli- 
gious life had been incalculably deepened by her 
disgust at what she considered the blasphemous in- 
troduction of the Holy Name into the Christian Can- 
didate's political canvassing. The arguments of Mr. 
Taxater and the conventional anglicanism of her 
mother, were, compared with this, only mild incen- 
tives to the step she meditated. The whole fabric 
of her piety and her taste had been shocked to their 
foundations by the unctuous complacency of Mr. 
Romer's evangelical rival. 

Vennie felt, as she stood aside, in her retired rou- 
tine, and watched the political struggle sway to and 
fro in the village, as though the champions of both 
causes were odiously and repulsively in the wrong. 
The sly conservatism of the quarry-owner becoming, 
since the settlement of the strike, almost fulsome 
in its flattery of the working classes, struck her as 
the most unscrupulous bid for power that she had 
ever encountered; and when, combined with his new 
pose as the ideal employer and landlord, Mr. Romer 
introduced the imperial note, and talked lavishly of 
the economic benefits of the Empire, Vennie felt 
as though all that was beautiful and sacred in her 
feeling for the country of her birth, was blighted and 
poisoned at the root. 

But Mr. Wone's attitude of mind struck her as 
even more revolting. The quarry-owner was at 
least frankly and flagrantly cynical. He made no 
attempt — unless Gladys' confirmation was to be re- 
garded as such — to conciliate religious sentiment. He 



SAGITTARIUS 433 

never went to church, and in private conversation he 
expressed his atheistic opinions with humorous and 
careless shamelessness. But Mr. Wone's intermin- 
gling of Protestant unction with political chicanery 
struck the passionate soul of the young girl as some- 
thing very nearly approaching the "unpardonable 
sin." Her incisive intelligence, fortified of late by 
conversations with Mr. Taxater, revolted, too, against 
the vague ethical verbiage and loose democratic 
sentiment with which Mr. Wone garnished his lightest 
talk. Since Philip's release from prison and his reap- 
pearance in the village, she had taken the opportun- 
ity of having several interviews with the Christian 
Candidate's son, and these interviews, though they 
saddened and perplexed her, increased her respect 
for the young man in proportion as they diminished 
it for his father. With true feminine instinct Vennie 
found the anarchist more attractive than the so- 
cialist, and the atheist less repugnant than the 
missionary. 

One afternoon, towards the end of the first week 
in August, Vennie persuaded Mr. Taxater to accom- 
pany her on a long walk. They made their way 
through the wood which separates the fields around 
Nevilton Mount from the fields around Leo's Hill. 
Issuing from this wood, along the path followed by 
every visitor to the hill who wishes to avoid its 
steeper slopes, they strolled leisurely between the 
patches of high bracken-fern and looked down upon 
the little church of Athelston. 

Athleston was a long, rambling village, encircling 
the northern end of the Leonian promontory and 
offering shelter, in many small cottages all heavily 



434 WOOD AND STONE 

built of the same material, to those of the workmen 
in the quarries who were not domiciled in Nevil- 
ton. 

"It would be rather nice," said Vennie to the 
theologian, "if it wouldn't spoil our walk, to go 
and look at that carving in the porch, down there. 
They say it has been cleaned lately, and the figures 
show up more clearly." 

The papal champion gravely surveyed the outline 
of the little cruciform church, as it shimmered, warm 
and mellow, in the misty sunshine at their feet. 

"Yes, I know," he remarked. "I met our friend 
Andersen there the other day. He told me he had 
been doing the work quite alone. He said it was one 
of the most interesting things he had ever done. 
By the way, I am confident that that rumour we 
heard, of his getting unsettled in his mind, is abso- 
lutely untrue. I have never found him more sensible 
— you know how silent he is as a rule? When I 
met him he was quite eloquent on the subject of 
mediaeval carving." 

Vennie looked down and smiled — a sad little smile. 
"I'm afraid," she said; "that his talking so freely 
is not quite a good sign. But do let's go. I have 
never looked at those queer figures with anyone but 
my mother; and you know the way she has of 
making everything seem as if it were an ornament 
on her own mantelpiece." 

They began descending the hill, Mr. Taxater dis- 
playing more agility than might have been expected 
of him, as they scrambled down between furze- 
bushes, rabbit-holes, and beds of yellow trefoil. 

"How dreadfully I shall miss you, dear child," he 



SAGITTARIUS 435 

said. " No one could accuse me of selfishness in further- 
ing your wish for the religious life. Half the pleas- 
ant discoveries I've made in this charming country 
have been due to you." 

The young girl turned and regarded him affec- 
tionately. "You have been more than a father to 
me," she murmured. 

"Ah, Vennie, Vennie! he protested, "you mustn't 
talk like that. After all, the greatest discovery we 
have made, is the discovery of your calling for 
religion. I have much to be thankful for. It is 
not often that I have been permitted such a privilege. 
If we had not been thrown together, who knows but 
that the influence of our good Clavering " 

Vennie blushed scarlet at the mention of the priest's 
name, and to hide her confusion, buried her head 
in a great clump of rag-wort, pressing its yellow 
clusters vehemently against her cheeks, with agitated 
trembling hands. 

When she lifted up her face, the fair hair under her 
hat was sprinkled with dewy moisture. "The turn 
of the year has come," she said. "There's mist on 
everything today." She smiled, with a quick em- 
barrassed glance at her companion. 

"The turn of the year has come," repeated the 
champion of the papacy. 

They descended the slope of yet another field, and 
then paused again, leaning upon a gate. 

"Have you ever thought how strange it is," re- 
marked the girl, as they turned to survey the scene 
around them, "that those two hills should still, in 
a way, represent the struggle between good and 
evil? I always wish that my ancestors had built a 



436 WOOD AND STONE 

chapel on Nevilton Mount instead of that silly little 
tower." 

The theologian fixed his eyes on the two em- 
inences which, from the point where they stood, 
showed so emphatically against the smouldering 
August sky. 

"Why do you call Leo's Hill evil?" he asked. 

Vennie frowned. "I always have felt like that 
about it," she answered. "It's an odd fancy I've got. 
I can't quite explain it. Perhaps it's because I know 
something of the hard life of the quarry-men. Per- 
haps it's because of Mr. Romer. I really can't tell 
you. But that's the feeling I have!" 

"Our worthy Mr. Wone would thank you, if you 
lent him your idea for use in his speeches," remarked 
the theologian with a chuckle. 

"That's just it!" cried Vennie. "It teases me, 
more than I can say, that the cause of the poor 
should be in his hands. I can't associate him with 
anything good or sacred. His being the one to 
oppose Mr. Romer makes me feel as though God had 
left us completely, left us at the mercy of the false 
prophets!" 

"Child, child!" expostulated Mr. Taxater — " Cus- 
todit Dominus animas sanctorum suorum; de manu 
peccatoris liber abit eos." 

"But it is so strange," continued Vennie. "It is 
one of the things I cannot understand. Why should 
God have to use other means than those His church 
offers to defeat the designs of wicked people? I wish 
miracles happened more often! Sometimes I dream 
of them happening. I dreamt the other night that 
an angel, with a great silver sword, stood on the top 



SAGITTARIUS 437 

of Nevilton Mount, and cried aloud to all the dead 
in the churchyard. Why can't God send real angels 
to fight His battles, instead of using wolves in 
sheep's clothing like that wretched Mr. Wone?" 

The champion of the papacy smiled. "You are 
too hard on our poor Candidate, Vennie. There's 
more of the sheep than the wolf about our worthy 
Wone, after all. But you touch upon a large ques- 
tion, my dear; a large question. That great circle, 
whose centre is everywhere and its circumference 
nowhere, as St. Thomas says, must needs include 
many ways to the fulfilment of His ends, which are 
mysterious to us. God is sometimes pleased to use 
the machinations of the most evil men, even their 
sensual passions, and their abominable vices, to 
bring about the fulfilment of His will. And we, dear 
child," he added after a pause, "must follow God's 
methods. That is why the church has always con- 
demned as a dangerous heresy that Tolstoyan doc- 
trine of submission to evil. We must never submit 
to evil! Our duty is to use against it every weapon 
the world offers." Weapons that in themselves are 
unholy, become holy — nay ! even sacred — when 
used in the cause of God and His church." 

Vennie remained puzzled and silent. She felt a 
vague, remote dissatisfaction with her friend's argu- 
ment; but she found it difficult to answer. She 
glanced sadly up at the cone-shaped mount above 
them, and wished that in place of that heathen- 
looking tower, she could see her angel with the 
silver sword. 

"It is all very confusing," she murmured at last, 
"and I shall be glad when I am out of it." 



438 WOOD AND STONE 

The theologian laid his hand — the hand that 
ought to have belonged to a prince of the church — 
upon his companion's. 

"You will be out of it soon, child," he said, "and 
then you will help us by your prayers. We who are 
the temporal monks of the great struggle are bound 
to soil our hands in the dust of the arena. But 
your prayers, and the prayers of many like you, 
cleanse them continually from such unhappy stains." 

Even at the moment he was uttering these profound 
words, Mr. Taxater was wondering in his heart 
how far his friend's inclination to a convent depended 
upon an impulse much more natural and feminine 
than the desire to avoid the Mr. Romers and Mr. 
Wones of this poor world. He made a second rather 
brutal experiment. 

"We must renounce," he said, "all these plausible 
poetic attempts to be wiser than God's Holy Church. 
That is one of the faults into which our worthy 
Clavering falls." 

Once more the tell-tale scarlet rushed into the 
cheeks of Nevilton's little nun. 

"Yes," she answered, stooping to pluck a spray of 
wild basil, "I know." 

They opened the gate, and very soon found them- 
selves at the entrance to Athelston church. Late 
summer flowers, planted in rows on each side of 
the path, met them with a ravishing fragrance. 
Stocks and sweet-williams grew freely among the 
graves; and tall standard roses held up the wealth 
of their second blossoming, like chalices full of 
red and white wine. Heavy-winged brown butter- 
flies fluttered over the grass, like the earth-drawn 



SAGITTARIUS 439 

spirits, Vennie thought, of such among the dead as 
were loath to leave the scene of their earthly pleas- 
ures. Mounted upon a step-ladder in the porch was 
the figure of James Andersen, absorbed in removing 
the moss and lichen from the carving in the central 
arch. 

He came down at once when he perceived their 
approach. "Look!" he said, with a wave of his hand, 
"you can see what it is now." 

Obedient to his words they both gazed curiously 
at the quaint early Norman relief. It represented 
a centaur, with a drawn bow and arrow, aiming at 
a retreating lion, which was sneaking off in humor- 
ously depicted terror. 

"That is King Stephen," , said the stone-carver, 
pointing to the centaur. "And the beast he is 
aiming at is Queen Maud. Stephen's zodiacal sign 
was Sagittarius, and the woman's was Leo. Hence 
the arrow he is aiming." 

Vennie's mind, reverting to her fanciful distinction 
between the two eminences, and woman-like, asso- 
ciating everything she saw with the persons of her 
own drama, at once began to discern, between the 
retreating animal and the fair-haired daughter of the 
owner of Leo's Hill, a queer and grotesque resem- 
blance. 

She heaved a deep sigh. What would she not give 
to see her poor priest-centaur aim such an arrow of 
triumph at the heart of his insidious temptress! 

"I think you have made them stand out won- 
derfully clear," she said gently. "Hasn't he, Mr. 
Taxater?" 

The stone-carver threw down the instrument he 



440 WOOD AND STONE 

was using, and folded his arms. His dark, foreign- 
looking countenance wore a very curious expression. 

"I wanted to finish this job," he remarked, in a 
slow deep voice, "before I turn into stone myself." 

"Come, come, my friend," said Mr. Taxater, while 
Vennie stared in speechless alarm at the carver's 
face. "You mustn't talk like that! You people 
get a wrong perspective in things. Remember, this 
is no longer the Stone Age. The power of stone was 
broken once for all, when certain women of Palestine 
found that stone, which we've all heard of, lifted 
out of its place ! Since then it is to wood — the 
wood out of which His cross was made — not to 
stone, that we must look." 

The carver raised his long arm and pointed in the 
direction of Leo's Hill. "Twenty years," he said, 
"have I been working on this stone. I used to de- 
spise such work. Then I grew to care for it. Then 
there came a change. I loved the work! It was the 
only thing I loved. I loved to feel the stone under 
my hands, and to watch it yielding to my tools. I 
think the soul of it must have passed into my soul. 
It seemed to know me; to respond to me. We be- 
came like lovers, the stone and I!" He laughed an 
uneasy, disconcerting laugh; and went on. 

"But that is not all. Another change came. She 
came into my life. I needn't tell you, Miss Seldom, 
who I mean. You know well enough. These things 
cannot be hidden. Nothing can be hidden that 
happens here! She came and was kind to me. 
She is kind to me still. But they have got hold of 
her. She can't resist them. Why she can't, I cannot 
say; but it seems impossible. She talks to me like 



SAGITTARIUS 441 

a person in a dream. They're going to marry her 
to that brute Goring. You've heard that I suppose? 
But of course it's nothing to you! Why should it be?" 

He paused, and Vennie interrupted him sharply. 
"It is a great deal to us, Mr. Andersen! Every 
cruel thing that is done in a place affects everyone 
who lives in the place. If Mr. Taxater and — and 
Mr. Clavering — thought that Miss Traffio was 
being driven into this marriage, I'm sure they would 
not allow it ! They would do something — every- 
thing — to stop such an outrage. Wouldn't you, Mr. 
Taxater? " 

"But surely, Vennie," said the theologian, "you 
have heard something of this? You can't be quite 
so oblivious, as all that, to the village scandal?" 

He spoke with a certain annoyance as people are 
apt to do, when some disagreeable abuse, which they 
have sought to forget, is brought vividly before them. 

Vennie, too, became irritable. The question of 
Lacrima's marriage had more than once given her 
conscience a sharp stab. "I think it is a shame to 
us all," she cried vehemently, "that this should be 
allowed. It is only lately that I've heard rumours 
of it, and I took them for mere gossip. It's been on 
my mind." She looked almost sternly at the the- 
ologian. "I meant to talk to you about it. But 
other things came between. I haven't seen Lacrima 
for several weeks. Surely, if it is as Mr. Andersen 
says, something ought to be done! It is a horrible, 
perfectly horrible idea!" She covered her face with 
her hands as if to shut out some unbearable vision. 

James Andersen watched them both intently, lean- 
ing against the wood-work of the church-door. 



442 WOOD AND STONE 

"I thought you all knew of this," he said presently. 
"Perhaps you did; but the devil prompted you to 
say nothing. There are a great many things in this 
world which are done while people — good people — 
look on — and nothing said. Do you wonder now 
that the end of this business will be a curious one; 
I mean for me? For you know, of course, what 
is going to happen? You know why I have been 
chosen to work at this particular piece of carving? 
And why, ever since I quarelled with Luke and 
drank in Hullaway Inn, I have heard voices in my 
head? The reason of that is, that Leo's Hill is angry 
because I have deserted it. Every stone I touch is 
angry, and keeps talking to me and upbraiding me. 
The voices I hear are the voices of all the stones I 
have ever worked with in my life. But they needn't 
fret themselves. The end will surprise even them. 
They do not know," — here his voice took a lower 
tone, and he assumed that ghastly air of imparting 
a piece of surprising, but quite natural, information, 
which is one of the most sinister tokens of mono- 
mania, — "that I shall very soon be, even as they are! 
Isn't it funny they don't know that, Miss Seldom? 
Isn't it a curious thing, Mr. Taxater? I thought of 
that, just now, as I chipped the dirt from King 
Stephen. Even he didn't know, the foolish centaur! 
And yet he has been up there, seeing this sort of 
thing done, for seven hundred years! I expect he 
has seen so many girls dragged under this arch, with 
sick terror in their hearts, that he has grown callous 
to it. A callous king! A knavish-smiling king! It 
makes me laugh to think how little he cares!" 

The unfortunate man did indeed proceed to laugh; 



SAGITTARIUS 443 

but the sound of it was so ghastly, even to himself, 
that he quickly became grave. 

"Luke will be here soon," he said. "Luke has 
always come for me, these last few days, when his 
work is over. It'll be over soon now, I think. He 
may be here any moment; so I'd better finish the 
job. Don't you worry about Lacrima, ladies and 
gentlemen! She'll fly away with the rooks. This 
centaur-king will never reach her with his arrows. 
It'll be me, not her, he'll turn into stone!" 

He became silent and continued his labour upon the 
carving. The wonder was that with his head full of 
such mad fancies he could manage so delicate a 
piece of work. Mr. Taxater and Vennie watched 
him in amazement. 

"I think," whispered the latter presently, "we'd 
better wait in the churchyard till his brother comes. 
I don't like leaving him in this state." 

Mr. Taxater nodded, aDd retreating to the further 
end of the path, they sat down together upon a 
flat tombstone. 

"I am sorry," said Mr. Taxater, after a minute 
or two's silence, "that I spoke rather crossly to you 
just now. The truth is, the man's reference to that 
Italian girl made me feel ashamed of myself. I have 
not your excuse of being ignorant of what was going 
on. I have, in fact, been meaning to talk to you 
about it for some weeks; but I hesitated, wishing to 
be quite sure of my ground first. 

"Even now, you must remember, we have no cer- 
tain authority to go upon. But I'm afraid — I'm 
very much afraid — what Andersen says is true. 
It is evidently his own certain knowledge of it that 



444 WOOD AND STONE 

has upset his brain. And I'm inclined to take his 
word for it. I fear the girl must have told him her- 
self; and it was the shock of hearing it from her 
that had this effect. 

" There's no doubt he's seriously ill. But if I know 
anything of these things, it's rather a case of extreme 
nervous agitation than actual insanity. In any 
event, it's a relief to remember that this kind of 
mania is, of all forms of brain-trouble, the easiest 
cured." 

Vennie made an imperious little gesture. "We 
must cure him!" she cried. "We must! We must! 
And the only way to do it, as far as I can see, is to 
stop this abominable marriage. Lacrima can't be 
doing it willingly. No girl would marry a man like 
that, of her own accord." 

Mr. Taxater shook his head. "I'm afraid there 
are few people," he remarked, "that some girl or 
other wouldn't marry if the motive were strong 
enough! The question is, what is the motive in this 
instance?" 

"What can Mr. Quincunx be thinking of?" said 
Vennie. "He hasn't been up to see mother lately. 
In fact, I don't think he has been in our house since 
he began working in Yeoborough. That's another 
abominable shame! It seems to me more and more 
clear that there's an evil destiny hanging over this 
place, driving people on to do wicked things!" 

"I'm afraid we shall get small assistance from 
Mr. Quincunx," said the theologian. "The relations 
between him and Lacrima are altogether beyond my 
power of unravelling. But I cannot imagine his 
taking any sort of initiative in any kind of difficulty." 



SAGITTARIUS 445 

"Then what are we to do?" pleaded Vennie, look- 
ing anxiously into the diplomatist's face. 

Mr. Taxater rested his chin upon the handle of his 
cane and made no reply. 

At this moment the gate clicked behind them, and 
Luke Andersen appeared. He glanced hastily to- 
wards the porch; but his brother was absorbed in 
his work and apparently had heard nothing. Step- 
ping softly along the edge of the path he approached 
the two friends. He looked very anxious and 
troubled. 

Raising his hat to Vennie, he made a gesture with 
his hand in his brother's direction. "Have you seen 
him?" he enquired. "Has he talked to you?" 

The theologian nodded. 

"Oh, I think all this is dreadful!" whispered Vennie. 
"I'm more distressed than I can tell you. I'm 
afraid he's very, very ill. And he keeps talking 
about Miss Traffic Surely something can be done, 
Mr. Andersen, to stop that marriage before it's too 
late?" 

Luke turned upon her with an expression completely 
different from any she had ever seen him wear before. 
He seemed to have suddenly grown much older. 
His mouth was drawn, and a little open; and his 
cheeks were pale and indented by deep lines. 

"I would give my soul," he said with intense em- 
phasis, "to have this thing otherwise. I have al- 
ready been to Lacrima — to Miss Traffio, I mean — 
but she will do nothing. She is mad, too, I think. 
I hoped to get her to marry my brother, off-hand, 
anyhow; and leave the place with him. But she 
won't hear of it. I can't understand her! It almost 



446 WOOD AND STONE 

seems as if she wanted to marry that clown. But 
she can't really; it's impossible. I'm afraid that 
fool Quincunx is at the bottom of it." 

"Something must be done! Something must be 
done!" wailed Vennie. 

" Sustinuit anima mea in verbo ejus!" muttered Mr. 
Taxater. " Speravit anima mea in Domino." 

"I shouldn't mind so much the state he's in," 
continued Luke, "if I didn't remember how my 
mother went. She got just like this before she died. 
It's true my father was a brute to her. But this 
different kind of blow seems to have just the same 
effect upon James. Fool that I am, I must needs 
start a miserable quarrel with him when he was most 
worried. If anything happens, I tell you I shall feel 
I'm responsible for the whole thing, and no one else!" 

All this while Mr. Taxater had remained silent, 
his chin on the handle of his cane. At last he lifted 
up his head. 

"I think," he began softly, "I should rather like a 
word alone with Mr. Luke, Vennie. Perhaps you 
wouldn't mind wandering down the lane a step or 
two? Then I can follow you; and we'll leave this 
young man to get his brother home." 

The girl rose obediently and pressed the youth's 
hand. "If anyone can help you," she said with a 
look of tender sympathy, "it is Mr. Taxater. He has 
helped me in my trouble." 

As soon as Vennie was out of hearing the theolo- 
gian looked straight into Luke's face. 

"I have an idea," he said, "that if any two people 
can find a way out of this wretched business, it is 
you and I together." 



SAGITTARIUS 447 

"Well, sir," said Luke, seating himself by Mr. 
Taxater's side and glancing apprehensively towards 
the church-porch; "I have tried what I can do with 
Miss Romer, but she maintains that nothing she can 
say will make any difference to Miss Traffio." 

"I fancy there is one thing, however, that would 
make a difference to Mr. Quincunx," remarked the 
theologian significantly. "I am taking for granted," 
he added, "that it is this particular marriage which 
weighs so heavily on your brother. He would 
not suffer if he saw her wedded to a man she 
loved?" 

"Ah!" exclaimed Luke, "your idea is to appeal to 
Quincunx. I've thought of that, too. But I'm 
afraid its hopeless. He's such an inconceivably 
helpless person. Besides, he's got no money." 

"Suppose we secured him the money?" said Mr. 
Taxater. 

Luke's countenance momentarily brightened; but 
the cloud soon settled on it again. 

"We couldn't get enough," he said with a sigh. 
"Unless," he added, with a glimmer of humour, "you 
or some other noble person have more cash to dispose 
of than I fancy is at all likely! To persuade Quin- 
cunx into any bold activity we should have to guar- 
antee him a comfortable annuity for the rest of his 
life, and an assurance of his absolute security from 
Romer's vengeance. It would have to be enough 
for Lacrima, too, you understand!" 

The theologian shook the dew-drops from a large 
crimson rose which hung within his reach. 

"What precise sum would you suggest," he asked, 
"as likely to be a sufficient inducement?" 



448 WOOD AND STONE 

The stone-carver meditated. "Those two could 
live quite happily," he remarked at last, "on two 
hundred a year." 

"It is a large amount to raise," said Mr. Taxater. 
"I fear it is quite beyond my power and the power of 
the Seldoms, even if we combined our efforts. How 
right Napoleon was, when he said that in any cam- 
paign, the first, second, and third requisite was 
money ! 

"It only shows how foolish those critics of the 
Catholic Church are, who blame her for laying stress 
upon the temporal side of our great struggle against 
evil. In this world, as things go, one always strikes 
sooner or later against the barrier of money. The 
money-question lies at the bottom of every sub- 
terranean abuse and every hidden iniquity that we 
unmask. It's a wretched thing that it should be 
so, but we have to accept it; until one of Vennie's 
angels" — he added in an under-tone — "descends 
to help us! Your poor brother began talking just 
now about the power of stone. I referred him to 
the Cross of our Lord — which is made of another 
material ! 

"But unfortunately in the stress of this actual 
struggle, you and I, my dear Andersen, find ourselves, 
as you see, compelled to call in the help, not of wood, 
but of gold. Gold, and gold alone, can furnish us 
with the means of undermining these evil powers!" 

The texture of Mr. Taxater's mind was so nicely 
inter-threaded with the opposite strands of meta- 
physical and Machiavellian wisdom, that this dis- 
course, fantastic as it may sound to us, fell from 
him as naturally as rain from a heavy cloud. Luke 



SAGITTARIUS 449 

Andersen's face settled into an expression of hopeless 
gloom. 

"The thing is beyond us, then," he said. "I cer- 
tainly can't provide an enormous sum like that. 
James' and my savings together only amount to a 
few hundreds. And if no quixotic person can be 
discovered to help us, we are bound hand and foot. 

"Oh I should like," he cried, "to make this place 
ring and ting with our triumph over that damned 
Romer!" 

"Quis est iste Rex glorias?" muttered the Theologian. 
"Dominus fortis et potens; Dominus potens in prcelio." 

"I shall never dare," went on the stone-carver, 
"to get my brother away into a home. The least 
thought of such a thing would drive him absolutely 
out of his mind. He'll have to be left to drift about 
like this, talking madly to everyone he meets, till 
something terrible happens to him. God! I could 
howl with rage, to think how it all might be saved if 
only that ass Quincunx had a little gall!" 

Mr. Taxater tapped the young man's wrist with 
his white fingers. "I think we can put gall into him 
between us," he said. "I think so, Andersen." 

"You've got some idea, sir!" cried Luke, looking 
at the theologian. "For Heaven's sake, let's have 
it! I am completely at the end of my tether." 

"This American who is engaged to Gladys is im- 
mensely rich, isn't he?" enquired Mr. Taxater. 

"Rich?" answered Luke. "That's not the word 
for it! The fellow could buy the whole of Leo's 
Hill and not know the difference." 

Mr. Taxater was silent, fingering the gold cross 
upon his watch-chain. 



450 WOOD AND STONE 

"It remains with yourself then," he remarked at 
last. 

"What!" cried the astonished Luke. 

"I happen to be aware," continued the diplomatist, 
calmly, "that there is a certain fact which our friend 
from Ohio would give half his fortune to know. He 
certainly would very willingly sign the little docu- 
ment for it, that would put Mr. Quincunx and Miss 
Traffio into a position of complete security. It is 
only a question of 'the terrain of negotiation,' as we 
say in our ecclesiastical circles." 

Luke Andersen's eyes opened very widely, and the 
amazement of his surprise made him look more like 
an astounded faun than ever — a faun that has 
come bolt upon some incredible triumph of civiliza- 
tion. 

"I will be quite plain with you, young man," said 
the theologian. "It has come to my knowledge 
that you and Gladys Romer are more than friends; 
have been more than friends, for a good while past. 

"Do not wave your hand in that way! I am not 
speaking without evidence. I happen to know as 
a positive fact that this girl is neither more nor less 
than your mistress. I am also inclined to believe — 
though of this, of course, I cannot be sure — that, as 
a result of this intrigue, she is likely, before the 
autumn is over, to find herself in a position of con- 
siderable embarrassment. It is no doubt, with a 
view to covering such embarrassment — you under- 
stand what I mean, Mr. Andersen? — that she is 
making preparations to have her marriage performed 
earlier than was at first intended." 

"God!" cried the astounded youth, losing all self- 



SAGITTARIUS 451 

possession, "how, under the sun, did you get to 
know this?" L 

Mr. Taxater smiled. "We poor controversialists," he 
said, "have to learn, in self-defence, certain innocent 
arts of observation. I don't think that you and your 
mistress," he added, "have been so extraordinarily dis- 
creet, that it needed a miracle to discover your secret." 

Luke Andersen recovered his equanimity with a vigor- 
ous effort. "Well?" he said, rising from his seat and 
looking anxiously at his brother, "what then?" 

As he uttered these words the young stone-carver's 
mind wrestled in grim austerity with the ghastly 
hint thrown out by his companion. He divined with 
an icy shock of horror the astounding proposal that 
this amazing champion of the Faith was about to 
unfold. He mentally laid hold of this proposal as a 
man might lay hold upon a red-hot bar of iron. 
The interior fibres of his being hardened themselves 
to grasp without shrinking its appalling treachery. 

Luke had it in him, below his urbane exterior, to 
rend and tear away every natural, every human 
scruple. He had it in him to be able to envisage, 
with a shamelessness worthy of some lost soul of the 
Florentine's Inferno, the fire-scorched walls of such a 
stark dilemma. The palpable suggestion which now 
hung, as it were, suspended in the air between them, 
was a suggestion he was ready to grasp by the throat. 

The sight of his brother's gaunt figure, every line of 
which he knew and loved so well, turned his conscience 
to adamant. Sinking into the depths of his soul, as a 
diver might sink into an ice-cold sea, he felt that there 
was literally nothing he would not do, if his dear Daddy 
James could be restored to sanity and happiness. 



452 WOOD AND STONE 

Gladys? He would walk over the bodies of a hun- 
dred Gladyses, if that way, and that alone, led to 
his brother's restoration! 

"What then?" he repeated, turning a bleak but 
resolute face upon Mr. Taxater. 

The theologian continued: "Why, it remains for 
you, or for someone deputed by you, to reveal to our 
unsuspecting American exactly how his betrothed has 
betrayed him. I have no doubt that in the dis- 
turbance this will cause him we shall have no diffi- 
culty in securing his aid in this other matter. It 
would be a natural, an inevitable revenge for him to 
take. Himself a victim of these Romers, what more 
appropriate, what more suitable, than that he should 
help us in liberating their other victims? If he is as 
wealthy as you say, it would be a mere bagatelle for 
him to set our good Quincunx upon his feet forever, and 
Lacrima with him! It is the kind of thing it would 
naturally occur to him to do. It would be a revenge; 
but a noble revenge. He would leave Nevilton then, 
feeling that he had left his mark; that he had made 
himself felt. Americans like to make themselves felt." 

Luke's countenance, in spite of his interior ac- 
quiescence, stiffened into a haggard mask of dismay. 

"But this is beyond anything one has ever heard of!" 
he protested, trying in vain to assume an air of levity. " It 
is beyond everything. Actually to convey, to the very 
man one's girl is going to marry, the news of her seduc- 
tion! Actually to 'coin her for drachmas,' as it says 
somewhere! It's a monstrous thing, an incredible 
thing!" 

"Not a bit more monstrous than your original sin 
in seducing the girl," said Mr. Taxater. 



SAGITTARIUS 453 

"That is the usual trick," he went on sternly, "of 
you English people! You snatch at your little pleas- 
ures, without any scruple, and feel yourselves quite 
honourable. And then, directly it becomes a question 
of paying for them, by any form of public con- 
fession, you become fastidiously scrupulous." 

"But to give one's girl away, to betray her in this 
shameless manner oneself! It seems to me the ulti- 
mate limit of scurvy meanness!" 

"It only seems to you so, because the illusion of 
chivalry enters into it; in other words, because pub- 
lic opinion would condemn you! This honourable 
shielding of the woman we have sinned with, at 
every kind of cost to others, has been the cause of 
endless misery. Do you think you are preparing a 
happy marriage for your Gladys in your 'honourable' 
reticence? By saving her from this union with Mr. 
Dangelis — whom, by the way, she surely cannot love, 
if she loves you — you will be doing her the best service 
possible. Even if she refuses to make you her husband 
in his place — and I suppose her infatuation would 
stop at that ! — there are other ways, besides marriage, 
of hiding her embarrassed condition. Let her travel 
for a year till her trouble is well over!" 

Luke Andersen reflected in silence, his drooping figure 
indicating a striking collapse of his normal urbanity. 

At last he spoke. "There may be something in 
what you suggest," he remarked slowly. "Obviously, 
I can't be the one," he added, after a further pause, 
"to strike this astounding bargain with the Ameri- 
can." 

"I don't see why not," said the theologian, with 
a certain maliciousness in his tone, "I don't see why 



454 WOOD AND STONE 

not. You have been the one to commit the sin; 
you ought naturally to be the one to perform the 
penance." 

The luckless youth distorted his countenance into 
such a wry grimace, that he caused it to resemble 
the stone gargoyles which protruded their lewd 
tongues from the church roof above them. 

"It's a scurvy thing to do, all the same," he 
muttered. 

"It is only relatively — 'scurvy,' as you call it," 
replied Mr. Taxater. " In an absolute sense, the 
'scurviness' would be to let your Gladys deceive 
an honest man and make herself unhappy for life, 
simply to save you two from any sort of exposure. 
But as a matter of fact, I am not inclined to place 
this very delicate piece of negotiation in your hands. 
It would be so fatally easy for you — under the cir- 
cumstances — to make some precipitate blunder that 
would spoil it all." 

"Don't think," he went on, observing the face of his 
interlocutor relapsing into sudden cheerfulness, "that I 
let you off this penance because of its unchivalrous 
character. You break the laws of chivalry quite as com- 
pletely by putting me into the possession of the facts. 

"I shall, of course," he added, "require from you 
some kind of written statement. The thing must be 
put upon an unimpeachable ground." 

Luke Andersen's relief was not materially modi- 
fied by this demand. He began to fumble in his 
pocket for his cigarette-case. 

"The great point to be certain of," continued 
Mr. Taxater, "is that Quincunx and Lacrima will 
accept the situation, when it is thus presented to 



SAGITTARIUS 455 

them. But I don't think we need anticipate any 
difficulty. In case of Dangelis' saying anything to 
Mr. Romer, though I do not for a moment imagine 
he will, it would be well if you and your brother 
were prepared to move, if need were, to some other 
scene of action. There is plenty of demand for skilled 
workmen like yourselves, and you have no ties here." 

The young man made a deprecatory movement 
with his hands. 

"We neither of us should like that, very much, 
sir. James and I are fonder of Nevilton than you 
might imagine." 

"Well, well," responded the theologian, "we can 
discuss that another time. Such a thing may not be 
necessary. I am glad to see, my friend," he added, 
"that whatever wrong you have done, you are willing 
to atone for it. So I trust our little plan will work 
out successfully. Perhaps you will look in, tomorrow 
night? I shall be at leisure then, and we can make 
our arrangements. Well, Heaven protect you, ' a sagitta 
volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris.' " 

He crossed himself devoutly as he spoke, and giving 
the young man a friendly wave of the hand, and 
an encouraging smile, let himself out through the 
gate and proceeded to follow the patient Vennie. 

He overtook his little friend somewhere not far 
from the lodge of that admirable captain, whose 
neatly-cut laurel hedge had witnessed, according to 
the loquacious Mrs. Fringe, the strange encounter 
between Jimmy Pringle and his Maker. Vennie 
was straying slowly along by the hedge-side, trailing 
her hand through the tall dead grasses. Hearing Mr. 
Taxater's footsteps, she turned eagerly to meet him. 



456 WOOD AND STONE 

"Well," she asked, "what does Luke say about his 
brother? Is it as bad as we feared?" 

"He doesn't think," responded the theologian, 
"any more than I do, that the thing has gone further 
than common hallucination." 

"And Lacrima — poor little Lacrimal — have you 
decided what we must do to intervene in her case?" 

"I think it may be said," responded the scholar 
gravely, "that we have hit upon an effective way of 
stopping that marriage. But perhaps it would be 
pleasanter and easier for you to remain at present 
in ignorance of our precise plan. I know," he added, 
smiling, "you do not care for hidden conspiracies." 

Vennie frowned. "I don't see why," she said, 
"there should be anything hidden about it! It seems 
to me, the thing is so abominable, that one would 
only have to make it public, to put an end to it 
completely. 

"I hope" — she clasped her hands — "I do hope, 
you are not fighting the evil one with the weapons 
of the evil one? If you are, I am sure it will end 
unhappily. I am sure and certain of it!" 

She spoke with a fervour that seemed almost 
prophetic; and as she did so, she unconsciously 
waved — with a pathetic little gesture of protest — 
the bunch of dead grasses which she held in her hand. 

Mr. Taxater walked gravely by her side; his pro- 
file, in its imperturbable immobility, resembling the 
mask of some great mediaeval ecclesiastic. The only 
reply he made to her appeal was to quote the famous 
Psalmodic invocation: "Nisi Dominus cedificaverit do- 
mum, in vanum laboraverunt qui oedificant earn." 

It would have been clear to anyone who had over- 



SAGITTARIUS 457 

heard his recent conversation with Luke, and now 
watched his reception of Vennie's instinctive protest, 
that whatever the actions of this remarkable man 
were, they rested upon a massive foundation of un- 
shakable philosophy. 

There was little further conversation between 
them; and at the vicarage gate, they separated with 
a certain air of estrangement. With undeviating 
feminine clairvoyance, Vennie was persuaded in the 
depths of her mind that whatever plan had been hit 
upon by the combined wits of the theologian and 
Luke, it was one whose nature, had she known it, 
would have aroused her most vehement condemnation. 
Nor in this persuasion will the reader of our curious 
narrative regard her as far astray from the truth. 

Meanwhile the two brothers were also returning 
slowly along the road to Nevilton. Had Mr. Claver- 
ing, whose opinion of the younger stone-carver was 
probably lower than that of any of his other critics, 
seen Luke during this time, he might have formed a 
kindlier judgment of him. Nothing could have 
exceeded the tact and solicitude with which he 
guided the conversation into safe channels. Nothing 
could have surpassed, in affectionate tenderness, the 
quick, anxious glances he every now and then cast 
upon his brother. There are certain human expres- 
sions which flit suddenly across the faces of men and 
women, which reveal, with the seal of absolute au- 
thenticity, the depth of the emotion they betray. 
Such a flitting expression, of a love almost maternal 
in its passionate depth, crossed the face of Luke 
Andersen at more than one stage of their homeward 
walk. 



458 WOOD AND STONE 

James seemed, on the whole, rather better than 
earlier in the day. The most ominous thing he did 
was to begin a long incoherent discourse about the 
rooks which kept circling over their heads on their 
way to the tall trees of Wild Pine. But this particu- 
lar event of the rooks' return to their Nevilton roost- 
ing-place was a phase of the local life of that spot 
calculated to impress even perfectly sane minds 
with romantic suggestion. It was always a sign of 
the breaking up of the year's pristine bloom when 
they came, a token of the not distant approach of 
the shorter equinoctial days. They flew hither, these 
funereal wayfarers, from far distant feeding-grounds. 
They did not nest in the Nevilton woods. Nevilton 
was to them simply a habitation of sleep. Many of 
them never even saw it, except in its morning and 
evening twilight. The place drew them to it at night- 
fall, and rejected them at sunrise. In the interval 
they remained passive and unconscious — huddled 
groups of black obscure shapes, tossed to and fro in 
their high branches, their glossy heads full of dreams 
beyond the reach of the profoundest sage. Before 
settling down to rest, however, it was their custom, 
even on the stormiest evenings, to sweep round, 
above the roofs of the village, in wide airy circles of 
restless flight, uttering their harsh familiar cries. 
Sailing quietly on a peaceful air or roughly buffeted 
by rainy gusts of wind — those westerly winds that 
are so wild and intermittent in this corner of England 
— these black tribes of the twilight give a character 
to their places of favourite resort which resembles 
nothing else in the world. The cawing of rooks is 
like the crying of sea-gulls. It is a sound that more 



SAGITTARIUS 459 

than anything flings the minds of men back to 
"old unhappy far-off things." 

The troubled soul of the luckless stone-carver went 
tossing forth on this particular night of embalmed 
stillness, driven in the track of those calmly circling 
birds, on the gust of a thought-tempest more for- 
midable than any that the fall of the leaves could 
bring. But the devoted passion of the younger 
brother followed patiently every flight it took; and 
by the time they had reached the vicarage-gate, and 
turned down the station-hill towards their lodging, 
the wild thoughts had fallen into rest, and like the 
birds in the dusk of their sheltering branches, were 
soothed into blessed forgetfulness. 

Luke had recourse, before they reached their dwel- 
ling, to the magic of old memories; and the end of 
that unforgettable day was spent by the two brothers 
in summoning up childish recollections, and in evoking 
the images and associations of their earliest compacts 
of friendship. 

When he left his brother asleep and stood for a 
while at the open window, Luke prayed a vague 
heathen prayer to the planetary spaces above his 
head. A falling star happened to sweep downward 
at that moment behind the dark pyramid of Nevilton 
Mount, and this natural phenomenon seemed to his 
excited nerves a sort of elemental answer to his in- 
vocation; as if it had been the very bolt of Sagit- 
tarius, the Archer, aimed at all the demons that 
darkened his brother's soul! 



CHAPTER XVIII 
VOICES BY THE WAY 

THE morning which followed James Andersen's 
completion of his work in Athelston church- 
porch, was one of the loveliest of the season. 
The sun rose into a perfectly cloudless sky. Every 
vestige of mist had vanished, and the half-cut corn- 
fields lay golden and unshadowed in the translucent 
air. Over the surface of every upland path, the 
little waves of palpable ether vibrated and quivered. 
The white roads gleamed between their tangled hedges 
as if they had been paved with mother-of-pearl. The 
heat was neither oppressive nor sultry. It penetrated 
without burdening, and seemed to flow forth upon 
the earth, as much from the general expanse of the 
blue depths as from the limited circle of the solar 
luminary. 

James Andersen seemed more restored than his 
brother had dared to hope. They went to their 
work as usual; and from the manner in which the 
elder stone-carver spoke to his mates and handled 
his tools, none would have guessed at the mad fan- 
cies which had so possessed him during the previous 
days. 

Luke was filled with profound happiness and relief. 
It is true that, like a tiny cloud upon the surface of 
this clear horizon, the thought of his projected be- 
trayal of his mistress remained present with him. 



VOICES BY THE WAY 461 

But in the depths of his heart he knew that he would 
have betrayed twenty mistresses, if by that means 
the brother of his soul could be restored to sanity. 

He had already grown completely weary of Gladys. 
The clinging and submissive passion with which the 
proud girl had pursued him of late had begun to 
irritate his nerves. More than once — especially 
when her importunities interrupted his newer pleas- 
ures — he had found himself on the point of hating 
her. He was absolutely cynical — and always had 
been — with regard to the ideal of faithfulness in 
these matters. Even the startling vision of the 
indignant Dangelis putting into her hands — as he 
supposed the American might naturally do — the 
actual written words with which he betrayed her, 
only ruffled his equanimity in a remote and even 
half-humorous manner. He recalled her contemptu- 
ous treatment of him on the occasion of their first 
amorous encounter and it was not without a certain 
malicious thrill of triumph that he realized how 
thoroughly he had been revenged. 

He had divined without difficulty on the occasion 
of their return from Hullaway that Gladys was on 
the point of revealing to him the fact that she was 
likely to have a child; and since that day he had 
taken care to give her little opportunity for such 
revelations. Absorbed in anxiety for James, he 
had been anxious to postpone this particular crisis 
between them till a later occasion. 

The situation, nevertheless, whenever he had 
thought of it, had given him, in spite of its com- 
plicated issues, an undeniable throb of satisfaction. 
It was such a complete, such a triumphant victory, 



462 WOOD AND STONE 

over Mr. Romer. Luke in his heart had an un- 
blushing admiration for the quarry-owner, whose 
masterly attitude towards life was not so very differ- 
ent from his own. But this latent respect for his 
employer rather increased than diminished his com- 
placency in thus striking him down. The remote 
idea that, in the whirligig of time, an offspring of 
his own should come to rule in Nevilton house — as 
seemed by no means impossible, if matters were 
discreetly managed — was an idea that gave him a 
most delicate pleasure. 

As they strolled back to breakfast together, across 
the intervening field, and admired the early dahlias 
in the station-master's garden, Luke took the risk 
of testing his brother on the matter of Mr. Quincunx. 
He was anxious to be quite certain of his ground 
here, before he had his interview with the tenant 
of the Gables. 

"I wish," he remarked casually, "that Maurice 
Quincunx would show a little spirit and carry La- 
crima off straight away." 

James looked closely at him. "If he would," he 
said, "I'd give him every penny I possess and I'd 
work day and night to help them! O Luke — Luke!" 
he stretched out his arm towards Leo's Hill and pro- 
nounced what seemed like a vow before the Eumen- 
ides themselves; "if I could make her happy, if I 
could only make her happy, I would be buried to- 
morrow in the deepest of those pits." 

Luke registered his own little resolution in the 
presence of this appeal to the gods. "Gladys? 
What is Gladys to me compared with James? All 
girls are the same. They all get over these things." 



VOICES BY THE WAY 463 

Meanwhile James Andersen was repeating in a 
low voice to himself the quaint name of his rival. 

"He is an ash-root, a tough ash-root," he mut- 
tered. "And that's the reason he has been chosen. 
There's nothing in the world but the roots of trees 
that can undermine the power of Stone! The trees 
can do it. The trees will do it. What did that 
Catholic say? He said it was Wood against Stone. 
That's the reason I can't help her. 1 have worked 
too long at Stone. I am too near Stone. That's 
the reason Quincunx has been chosen. She and I 
are under the power of Stone, and we can't resist it, 
any more than the earth can! But ash-tree roots 
can undermine anything. If only she would take 
my money, if only she would." 

This last aspiration was uttered in a voice loud 
enough for Luke to hear; and it may be well believed 
that it fortified him all the more strongly in his 
dishonourable resolution. 

During breakfast James continued to show signs 
of improvement. He talked of his mother, and 
though his conversation was sprinkled with some- 
what fantastic imagery, on the whole it was rational 
enough. 

While the meal was still in progress, the younger 
brother observed through the window the figure of 
a woman, moving oddly backwards and forwards 
along their garden-hedge, as if anxious at the same 
time to attract and avoid attention. He recognized 
her in a moment as the notorious waif of the neigh- 
borhood, the somewhat sinister Witch-Bessie. He 
made an excuse to his brother and slipped out to 
speak to her. 



464 WOOD AND STONE 

Witch-Bessie had grown, if possible, still more 
dehumanized since when two months ago she had 
cursed Gladys Romer. Her skin was pallid and 
livid as parchment. The eyes which stared forth 
from her wrinkled expressionless face were of a dull 
glaucous blue, like the inside of certain sun-bleached 
sea-shells. She was dressed in a rough sack-cloth 
petticoat, out of which protruded her stockingless 
feet, only half concealed by heavy labourer's boots, 
unlaced and in large holes. Over her thin shoulders 
she wore a ragged woolen shawl which served the office 
not only of a garment, but also of a wallet; for, in 
the folds of it, were even now observable certain 
half-eaten pieces of bread, and bits of ancient cheese, 
which she had begged in her wanderings. In one of 
her withered hands she held a large bunch of magen- 
ta-coloured, nettle-like flowers, of the particular species 
known to botanists as marsh-wound-wort. As soon 
as Luke appeared she thrust these flowers into his 
arms. 

"Gathered 'un for 'ee," she whispered, in a thin 
whistling voice, like the soughing of wind in a bed 
of rushes. "They be capital weeds for them as be 
moon-smitten. Gathered 'un, up by Seven Ashes, 
where them girt main roads do cross. Take 'un, 
mister; take 'un and thank an old woman wot loves 
both of 'ee, as heretofore she did love your long- 
sufferin' mother. I were bidin' down by Minister's 
back gate, expectin' me bit of oddments, when they 
did tell I, all sudden-like, as how he'd been taken, 
same as she was." 

"It's most kind of you, Bessie," said Luke gra- 
ciously. "You and I have always been good friends." 



VOICES BY THE WAY 465 

The old woman nodded. "So we be, mister, and 
let none say the contrary! I've a dangled 'ee, afore- 
now, in these very arms. Dost mind how 'ee drove 
that ramping girt dog out of Long-Load Barton when 
the blarsted thing were for laying hold of I?" 

"But what must I do with these?" asked the 
stone-carver, holding the bunch of pungent scented 
flowers to his face. 

"That's wot I was just a-going to tell 'ee," whis- 
pered the old woman solemnly. "I suppose he's 
in there now, eh? Let 'un be, poor man. Let 'un 
be. May-be the Lord's only waitin' for these 'ere 
weeds to mend 'is poor swimey wits. You do as I 
do tell 'ee, mister, and 'twill be all smoothed out, 
as clean as church floor. You take these blessed 
weeds, — ' viviny-lobs ' my old mother did call 'em — 
and hang 'em to dry till they be dead and brown. 
Then doddy a sprinkle o' good salt on 'em, and dip 
'em in clear water. Be you followin' me, mister 
Luke?" 

The young man nodded. 

"Then wot you got to do, is for to strike 'em 
'against door-post, and as you strikes 'em, you says, 
same as I says now." And Witch-Bessie repeated 
the following archaic enchantment. 

Marshy hollow woundy-wort, 

Growing on the holy dirt, 

In the Mount of Calvary 

There was thou found. 

In the name of sweet Jesus 

I take thee from the ground. 

O Lord, effect the same, 

That I do now go about. 



466 WOOD AND STONE 

Luke listened devoutly to these mysterious words, 
and repeated them twice, after the old woman. 
Their two figures, thus concerted in magical tutelage, 
might, for all the youth's modern attire, have sug- 
gested to a scholarly observer some fantastic heathen 
scene out of Apuleius. The spacious August sun- 
shine lay splendid upon the fields about them, and 
light-winged swallows skimmed the surface of the 
glittering railway-line as though it had been a flow- 
ing river. 

When she was made assured in her mind that her 
pupil fully understood the healing incantation, Witch- 
Bessie shuffled off without further words. Her 
face, as she resumed her march in the direction of 
Hullaway, relapsed into such corpse-like rigidity, 
that, but for her mechanical movement, one might 
have expected the shameless flocks of starlings who 
hovered about her, to settle without apprehension 
upon her head. 

The two brothers labored harmoniously side by 
side in their work-shop all that forenoon. It was 
Saturday, and their companions were anxious to 
throw down their tools and clear out of the place on 
the very stroke of the one o'clock bell. 

James and Luke were both engaged upon a new 
stone font, the former meticulously chipping out its 
angle-mouldings, and the latter rounding, with chisel 
and file, the capacious lip of its deep basin. It was 
a cathedral font, intended for use in a large northern 
city. 

Luke could not resist commenting to his brother, 
in his half-humorous half-sentimental way, upon the 
queer fact that they two — their heads full of their 



VOICES BY THE WAY 467 

own anxieties and troubles — should be thus working 
upon a sacred font which for countless generations, 
perhaps as long as Christianity lasted, would be asso- 
ciated with so many strange and mingled feelings of 
perturbation and hope. 

"It's a comical idea," he found himself saying, 
though the allusion was sufficiently unwise, "this 
idea of Gladys' baptism." 

He regretted his words the moment they were out 
of his mouth; but James received them calmly. 

"I once heard," he answered, "I think it was on 
the sands at Weymouth, two old men discussing 
quite reverently and gravely whether an infant, 
baptized before it was born, would be brought under 
the blessing of the Church. I thought, as I listened 
to them, how vulgar and gross-minded our age had 
become, that I should have to tremble with alarm 
lest any flippant passer-by should hear their curious 
speculation. It seemed to me a much more impor- 
tant matter to discuss, than the merits of the black- 
faced Pierrots who were fooling and howling just 
beyond. This sort of seriousness, in regard to the 
strange borderland of the Faith, has always seemed 
to me a sign of pathetic piety, and the very reverse 
of anything blasphemous." 

Luke had made an involuntary movement when 
his brother's anecdote commenced. The calmness 
and reasonableness with which James had spoken 
was balm and honey to the anxious youth; but he 
could not help speculating in his heart whether his 
brother was covertly girding at him. Did he, he 
wondered, realize how far things had gone between 
him and the fair-haired girl? 



468 WOOD AND STONE 

"It's the sort of question, at any rate," he remarked 
rather feebly, "that would interest our friend Sir 
Thomas Browne. Do you remember how we read 
together that amazing passage in the Urn Burial?" 

"'But the iniquity of oblivion,'" quoted James in 
answer, "'blindly scattereth her Poppy, and deals 
with the memory of men without distinction to merit 
of perpetuity. Who can but pity the founder of the 
Pyramids? Herostratus lives that burnt the temple 
of Diana; he is almost lost that built it. Time has 
spared the epitaph of Hadrian's Horse, confounded 
that of himself. In vain we compute our felicities by 
the advantage of our good names, since bad have 
equal durations; and Thersites is like to live as long 
as Agamemnon without the favour of the everlasting 
register. . . . Darkness and light divide the course of 
time, and oblivion shares with memory a great part 
even of our living beings; we slightly remember our 
felicities and the smartest strokes of affliction leave 
but short smart upon us. To weep into Stones are 
fables.'" 

He pronounced these last words with a slow and 
emphatic intonation. 

"Fables?" he repeated, resting his hand upon the 
rim of the font, and lowering his voice, so as not to 
be heard by the men outside. "He calls them fables 
because he has never worked as we do — day in and 
day out — among nothing else. The reason he says 
that to weep into Stones are fables is that his own 
life, down at that pleasant Norwich, was such a 
happy one. To weep into Stones! He means, of 
course, that when you have endured more than you 
can bear, you become a Stone. But that is no fable! 



VOICES BY THE WAY 469 

Or if it was once, it isn't so today. Mr. Taxater said 
the Stone-Age was over. In my opinion, Luke, the 
Stone-Age is only now beginning. The reason of 
that is, that whereas, in former times, Stone was 
moulded by men; now, men are moulded by Stone. 
We have receded, instead of advancing; and the 
iniquity of Time which turned animals into men, is 
now turning men back into the elements!" 

Luke cursed bitterly in his heart the rhythmic in- 
cantations of the old Norwich doctor. He had been 
thinking of a very different passage from that which 
his brother recalled. To change the conversation he 
asked how James wished to spend their free afternoon. 

Andersen's tone changed in a moment, and he 
grew rational and direct. "I am going for a walk," 
he said, "and I think perhaps, if you don't mind, 
I'll go alone. My brain feels clouded and oppressed. 
A long walk ought to clear it. I think it will clear 
it; don't you?" This final question was added 
rather wistfully. 

"I'm sure it will. Oh, it certainly will! I expect 
the sun has hit you a bit; or perhaps, as Mr. Taxater 
would say, your headache is a relative one, due to 
my dragging in such things as Urn Burial. But I 
don't quite like your going alone, Daddy James." 

The elder brother smiled affectionately at him, but 
went on quietly with his work without replying. 

When they had finished their mid-day meal they 
both loitered out into the field together, smoking and 
chatting. The afternoon promised to be as clear and 
beautiful as the morning, and Luke's spirits rose high. 
He hoped his brother, at the last moment, would not 
have the heart to reject his company. 



470 WOOD AND STONE 

The fineness of the weather, combined with the 
Saturday half-holiday, was attracting abroad all 
manner of Nevilton folk. Lads and maids, in merry 
noisy groups, passed and repassed. The platform of 
the little station was crowded with expectant pas- 
sengers waiting for the train to Yeoborough. 

As the brothers stood together, carelessly turning 
over with their sticks the fetid heads of a patch of 
meadow fungi, they observed two separate couples 
issuing, one after another, from the little swing-gate 
that opened on the level-crossing. They recognized 
both couples almost simultaneously. The first pair 
consisted of Annie Bristow and Phyllis Santon; the 
second of Vennie Seldom and Mr. Clavering. 

The two girls proceeded, arm-in-arm, up the sloping 
path that led in the direction of Hullaway. Vennie 
and Mr. Clavering advanced straight towards the 
brothers. Luke had time to wonder vaguely whether 
this conjunction of Vennie and her Anglican pastor 
had any connection with last night's happenings. 

He was too closely associated with that Gargantuan 
gossip, Mrs. Fringe, not to be aware that for many 
weeks past Miss Seldom and the young clergyman had 
studiously avoided one another. That they should 
now be walking together, indicated, to his astute 
mind, either a quarrel between the young lady and 
Mr. Taxater, or an estrangement between the vicar 
and Gladys. Luke was the sort of philosopher who 
takes for granted that in all these situations it is love 
for love, or hate for hate, which propels irresistibly 
the human mechanism and decides the most trifling 
incidents. 

James looked angry and embarrassed at the ap- 



VOICES BY THE WAY 471 

pearance of the pair; but they were too close upon 
them for any escape to be possible. 

"How are you today, Andersen?" began Mr. 
Clavering, with his usual well-meaning but indiscreet 
impulsiveness. "Miss Seldom tells me she was 
nervous about you last night. She was afraid you 
were working too hard." 

Vennie gave him a quick reproachful glance, and 
made a deprecatory movement with her hands. "Are 
all men," she thought, "either without scruple or 
without common-sense?" 

"I'm glad to see that I was quite mistaken," she 
hastened to add. "You don't look at all tired today, 
Mr. Andersen. And no wonder, with such a perfectly 
lovely afternoon! And how are you, Mr. Luke? I 
haven't been down to see how that Liverpool font is 
getting on, for ever so long. I believe you'll end by 
being quite as famous as your father." 

Luke received this compliment in his most courtly 
manner. He was always particularly anxious to 
impress persons who belonged to the "real" upper 
classes with his social sang-froid. 

He was at this precise moment, however, a little 
agitated by the conduct of the two young people who 
had just passed up the meadow. Instead of disap- 
pearing into the lane beyond, they continued to loiter 
at the gate, and finally, after an interlude of audible 
laughter and lively discussion, they proceeded to 
stretch themselves upon the grass. The sight of two 
amiable young women, both so extremely well known 
to him, and both in evident high spirits, thus enjoying 
the sunshine, filled our faun-like friend's mind with 
the familiar craving for frivolity. He caught Mr. 



472 WOOD AND STONE 

Clavering's glance fixed gravely upon him. He also, 
it appeared, was not oblivious of the loitering vil- 
lagers. 

"I think there are other members of your flock, 
sir," said James Andersen to the young vicar, "who 
are at the present moment more in need of your help 
than I am. What I need at this moment is air — 
air. I should like to be able to wander over the 
Quantocks this afternoon. Or better still, by the 
edge of the sea! We all need more air than we get 
here. It is too shut-in here — too shut-in and oppress- 
ive. There's too much stone about; and too much 
clay. Yes, and the trees grow too close together. 
Do you know, Miss Seldom, what I should like to do? 
I should like to pull down all the houses — I mean 
all the big houses — and cut down all the trees, and 
then perhaps the wind would be free to blow. It's 
wind we want — all of us — wind and air to clear 
our brains! Do you realize" — his voice once more 
took that alarming tone of confidential secretiveness, 
which had struck them so disagreeably the preceding 
evening; — "do you realize that there are evil spirits 
abroad in Nevilton, and that they come from the Hill 
over there?" He pointed towards the Leonian escarp- 
ments which could be plainly seen from where they 
stood, slumbering in the splendid sunshine. 

"It looks more like a sphinx than a lion today, 
doesn't it, Miss Seldom? Oh, I should like to tear it 
up, bodily, from where it lies, and fling it into the 
sea! It blocks the horizon. It blocks the path of 
the west-wind. I tell you it is the burden that 
weighs upon us all! But I shall conquer it yet; 
I shall be master of it yet!" He was silent a few 



VOICES BY THE WAY 473 

seconds, while a look of supreme disappointment 
clouded the face of his brother; and the two new- 
comers gazed at him in alarm. 

"I must start at once," he exclaimed abruptly. 
"I must get far, far off. It is air I need, air and the 
west-wind! No," he cried imperiously, when Luke 
made a movement, as if to take leave of their com- 
panions. "I must go alone. Alone! That is what I 
must be today: alone — and on the hills!" 

He turned impatiently as he spoke; and without 
another word strode off towards the level-crossing. 

"Surely you will not let him go like that, Mr. 
Andersen?" cried Vennie, in great distress. 

"It would do no good," replied Luke, watching his 
brother pass through the gate and cross the track. 
"I should only make him much worse if I tried to 
follow him. Besides, he wouldn't let me. I don't 
think he'll come to any harm. I should have a 
different instinct about it if there were real danger. 
Perhaps, as he says, a good long walk may really clear 
his brain." 

"I do pray your instinct is to be relied on," said 
Vennie, anxiously watching the tall figure of the 
stone-carver, as he ascended the vicarage hill. 

"Well, if you're not going to do your duty, Ander- 
sen, I'm going to do mine!" exclaimed the vicar of 
Nevilton, setting off, without further parley, in 
pursuit of the fugitive. 

"Stop! Mr. Clavering, I'll come with you," cried 
Vennie. And she followed her impulsive friend 
towards the gate. 

As they ascended the hill together, keeping Andersen 
in sight, Clavering remarked to his companion, "I 



474 WOOD AND STONE 

believe that dissolute young reprobate refused to 
look after his brother simply because he wanted to 
talk to those two girls." 

"What two girls?" enquired Vennie. 

"Didn't you see them?" muttered the clergyman 
crossly. "The Bristow girl and little Phyllis Santon. 
They were hanging about, waiting for him." 

"I'm sure you are quite wrong," replied Vennie. 
"Luke may have his faults, but he is devoted — 
madly devoted — to his brother." 

"Not at all," cried Clavering almost rudely. "I 
know the man better than you do. He is entirely 
selfish. He is a selfish, sensual pleasure-seeker! He 
may be fond of his brother in his fashion, just because 
he is his brother, and they have the same tastes; but 
his one great aim is his own pleasure. He has been 
the worst influence I have had to contend with, in 
this whole village, for some time back!" 

His voice trembled with rage as he spoke. It was 
impossible, even for the guileless Vennie, not to help 
wondering in her mind whether the violence of her 
friend's reprobation was not impelled by an emotion 
more personal than public. Her unlucky knowledge 
of what the nature of such an emotion might be did 
not induce her to yield meekly to his argument. 

"I don't believe he saw the people you speak of 
any more than I did," she said. 

"Saw them?" cried the priest wrathfully, quicken- 
ing his pace, as Andersen disappeared round the 
corner of the road, so that Vennie had to trot by his 
side like a submissive child. "I saw the look he 
fixed on them. I know that look of his! I tell you 
he is the kind of man that does harm wherever he 



VOICES BY THE WAY 475 

goes. He's a lazy, sensual, young scoundrel. He 
ought to be kicked out of the place." 

Vennie sighed deeply. Life in the world of men 
was indeed a complicated and entangled matter. She 
had turned, in her agitation about the stone-carver, 
and in her reaction from Mr. Taxater's reserve, 
straight to the person she loved best of all; and this 
was her reward, — a mere crude outburst of mascu- 
line jealousy! 

They rounded the corner by her own gate, where 
the road to Athelston deviates at right angles. James 
Andersen was no longer in sight. 

"Where the devil has the man got to?" cried the 
astonished clergyman, raging at himself for his ill- 
temper, and raging at Vennie for having been the 
witness of it. 

The girl glanced up the Athelston road; and hasten- 
ing forward a few paces, scanned the stately slope of 
the Nevilton west drive. The unfortunate man was 
nowhere to be seen. 

From where they now stood, the whole length of 
the village street was visible, almost as far as the 
Goat and Boy. It was full of holiday-making 
young people, but there was no sign of Andersen's 
tall and unmistakable figure. 

"Oh, this is dreadful!" cried Vennie. "What are 
we to do? Where can he have gone?" 

Hugh Clavering looked angrily round. He was 
experiencing that curious sense, which comes to the 
best of men sometimes, of being the special and 
selected object of providential mockery. 

"There are only two ways," he said. "Either he's 
slipped down through the orchards, along your wall, 



476 WOOD AND STONE 

or he's made off to Nevilton Mount! If that's what 
he's done, he must be now behind that hedge, over 
there. We should see him otherwise." 

Vennie gazed anxiously in the direction indicated. 
"He can't have gone into our garden?" she said. 
"No, he'd never do that! He talked about air and 
hills. I expect he's where you say. Shall we go on?" 

They hurried down the road until they reached a 
gate, on the further side of the hedge which ran to 
the base of Nevilton Mount. Here they entered the 
field. There was no sign of the fugitive; but owing to 
certain inequalities in the ground, and the interven- 
tion of some large elm-trees, it was still quite possible 
that he was only a few hundred yards in front of 
them. They followed the line of the hedge with all 
the haste they could; trusting, at every turn it made, 
that they would discover him. In this manner they 
very soon arrived at the base of the hill. 

"I feel sure he's somewhere in front of us!" mut- 
tered Clavering. "How annoying it is! It was 
outrageous of that young scoundrel to let him go like 
this; — wandering about the country in that mad 
state! If he comes to any harm, I shall see to it that 
that young man is held responsible." 

"Quick!" sighed Vennie breathlessly, "we'd better 
climb straight to the top. We must find him there!" 

They scrambled over the bank and proceeded to 
make their way as hurriedly as they could through 
the entangled undergrowth. Hot and exhausted they 
emerged at last upon the level summit. Here, the 
grotesque little tower mocked at them with its impas- 
sive grey surface. There was no sign of the man they 
sought; but seated on the grass with their backs to 



VOICES BY THE WAY 477 

the edifice were the figures of the complacent Mr. Wone 
and one of his younger children, engaged in the 
agreeable occupation of devouring a water-melon. 
The mouth and chin of the Christian Candidate were 
bespattered with the luscious juice of this delectable 
fruit, and laid out carefully upon a magazine on his 
knees, was a pleasing arrangement of rind-peelings 
and well-sucked pips. 

Mr. Wone waved his hand in polite acknowledg- 
ment of Clavering's salute. He removed his hat to 
Vennie, but apologized for not rising. "Taking a 
little holiday, you observe!" he remarked with a 
satisfied smile. "I see you also are inclined to 
make the most of this lovely summer day." 

"You haven't by any chance seen the elder Ander- 
sen, have you?" enquired Clavering. 

"Not a bit of it," replied the recumbent man. "I 
suppose I cannot offer you a piece of melon, Miss 
Seldom?" 

The two baffled pursuers looked at one another in 
hopeless disappointment. 

"We've lost him," muttered the priest. "He must 
have gone through your orchard after all." 

Mr. Wone did not miss this remark. "You were 
looking for our good James? No. We haven't seen 
anything of him. No doubt he is with his brother 
somewhere. I believe they usually spend their 
Saturdays out at Hullaway." 

"When does the election come off, Mr. Wone?" 
enquired Vennie, hastily, extremely unwilling that her 
tactless companion should disclose the purpose of 
their search. 

"In a week's time from next Monday," replied the 



478 WOOD AND STONE 

Candidate. "This will be my last free day till then. 
I have to make thirty speeches during the next seven 
days. Our cause goes well. I believe, with God's 
great help, we are practically certain of victory. It 
will be a great event, Miss Seldom, a great event." 

Mr. Clavering made a hopeless sign to Vennie, 
indicative of the uselessness of any further steps to 
retake the runaway. 

"I think your side will win in the country gener- 
ally," he remarked. "As to this district, I cannot 
tell. Mr. Romer has strengthened himself consider- 
ably by his action after the strike." 

The candidate placed a carefully selected piece of 
fruit in his mouth, and called to his little boy, who 
was scratching his initials with a knife upon the base 
of the tower. 

"He will be beaten all the same," he said. "He 
is bound to be beaten. The stars in their courses 
must fight against a man like that. I feel it in the 
air; in the earth; in these beautiful trees. I feel it 
everywhere. He has challenged stronger powers than 
you or me. He has challenged the majesty of God 
Himself. I'll give you the right" — he went on in a 
voice that mechanically assumed a preacher's tone — 
"to call me a liar and a false prophet, if by this time, 
in ten days, the oppressor of the poor does not find 
himself crushed and beaten!" 

"I am afraid right and wrong are more strangely 
mixed in this world than all that, Mr. Wone," Vennie 
found herself saying, with a little weary glance over 
the wide sun-bathed valleys extended at their feet. 

"Pardon me, pardon me, young lady," cried the 
Candidate. "In this great cause there can be no 



VOICES BY THE WAY 479 

doubt, no question, no ambiguity. The evolution of 
the human race has reached a point when the will of 
God must reveal itself in the triumph of love and 
liberty. Nothing else matters. All turns upon this. 
That is why I feel that my campaign is more than a 
political struggle. It is a religious struggle, and on 
our side are the great moral forces that uphold the 
world!" 

Vennie's exhausted nerves completely broke down 
upon this. 

"Shall we go?" she said, touching her companion 
on the sleeve. 

Clavering nodded, and bade the melon-eater "good 
afternoon," with a brusque gesture. 

As they went off, he turned on his heel. "The will 
of God, Mr. Wone, is only to be found in the obedient 
reception of His sacraments." 

The Christian candidate opened his mouth with 
amazement. "Those young people," he thought to 
himself, "are up to no good. They'll end by becom- 
ing papists, if they go on like this. Its extraordinary 
that the human mind should actually prefer slavery 
to freedom!" 

Meanwhile the man whose mysterious evasion of 
his pursuers had resulted in this disconcerting en- 
counter was already well-advanced on his way 
towards the Wild Pine ridge. He had, as a matter of 
fact, crossed the field between the west drive and 
the Vicarage-garden, and skirting the orchards below 
Nevilton House, had plunged into the park. 

A vague hope of meeting Lacrima — an instinctive 
rather than a conscious feeling — had led him in this 
direction. Once in the park, the high opposing ridge, 



480 WOOD AND STONE 

crowned with its sentinel-line of tall Scotch-firs, 
arrested his attention and drew him towards it. He 
crossed the Yeoborough road and ascended the incline 
of Dead Man's Lane. 

As he passed the cottage of his rival, he observed 
Mr. Quincunx energetically at work in his garden. 
On this occasion the recluse was digging up, not weeds, 
but young potatoes. He was in his shirt-sleeves and 
looked hot and tired. 

Andersen leaned upon the little gate and observed 
him with curious interest. "Why isn't she here?" 
he muttered to himself. Then, after a pause: "He 
is an ash-root. Let him drag that house down! 
Why doesn't he drag it down, with all its heavy 
stones? And the Priory too? And the Church; — 
yes; and the Church too! He burrows like a root. 
He looks like a root. I must tell him all these things. 
I must tell him why he has been chosen, and I have 
been rejected!" He opened the gate forthwith and 
advanced towards the potato-digger. 

Mr. Quincunx might have struck the imagination 
of a much less troubled spirit than that of the poor 
stone-carver as having a resemblance to a root. His 
form was at once knotted and lean, fibrous and 
delicate. His face, by reason of his stooping position, 
was suffused with a rich reddish tint, and his beard 
was dusty and unkempt. He rose hastily, on observ- 
ing his visitor. 

"People like you and me, James, are best by our- 
selves at these holiday-times," was his inhospitable 
greeting. "You can help me with my potatoes if you 
like. Or you can tell me your news as I work. Or 
do you want to ask me any question?" 



VOICES BY THE WAY 481 

He uttered these final words in such a tone as the 
Delphic oracle might have used, when addressing 
some harassed refugee. 

"Has she been up here today?" said the stone- 
carver. 

"I like the way you talk," replied the other. 
"Why should we mention their names? When I say 
people, I mean girls. When I say persons, I mean 
girls. When I say young ladies, I mean girls. And 
when you say 'she' you mean our girl." 

"Yours!" cried the demented man; "she is yours 

— not ours. She is weighed down by this evil Stone, 

— weighed down into the deep clay. What has she 
to do with me, who have worked at the thing so long?" 

Mr. Quincunx leant upon his hoe and surveyed the 
speaker. It occurred to him at once that something 
was amiss. "Good Lord!" he thought to himself, 
"the fellow has been drinking. I must get him out of 
this garden as quickly as possible." 

"She loves you," Andersen went on, "because you 
are like a root. You go deep into the earth and no 
stone can resist you. You twine and twine and 
twine, and pull them all down. They are all haunted 
places, these houses and churches; all haunted and 
evil! They make a man's head ache to live in them. 
They put voices into a man's ears. They are as full 
of voices as the sea is full of waves." 

"You are right there, my friend," replied Mr. 
Quincunx. "It's only what I've always said. Until 
people give up building great houses and great 
churches, no one will ever be happy. We ought to 
live in bushes and thickets, or in tents. My cottage 
is no better than a bush, I creep into it at night, 



482 WOOD AND STONE 

and out again in the morning. If its. thatch fell on 
my head I should hardly feel it." 

"You wouldn't feel it, you wouldn't!" cried the 
stone-carver. "And the reason of that is, that you 
can burrow like a root. I shouldn't feel it either, but 
for a different reason." 

"I expect you'd better continue your walk," re- 
marked Mr. Quincunx. "I never fuss myself about 
people who come to see me. If they come, they 
come. And when they go, they go." 

The stone-carver sighed and looked round him. 
The sun gleamed graciously upon the warm earth, 
danced and sparkled upon the windows of the cottage, 
and made the beads of sweat on Mr. Quincunx's brow 
shine like diamonds. 

"Do you think," he said, while the potato-digger 
turned to his occupation, "that happiness or unhappi- 
ness predominates in this world?" 

" Unhappiness ! " cried the bearded man, glaring at 
his acquaintance with the scowl of a goblin. "Un- 
happiness! Unhappiness! Unhappiness! That is why 
the only wise way to live is to avoid everything. 
That's what I always do. I avoid people, I avoid 
possessions, I avoid quarrels, I avoid lust, and I 
avoid love! My life consists in the art of avoiding 
things." 

"She doesn't want happiness," pleaded the obsessed 
stone-carver. "And her love is enough. She only 
wants to escape." 

"Why do you keep bringing Lacrima in?" cried 
the recluse. "She is going to marry John Goring. 
She is going to be mistress of the Priory." 

A convulsive shock of fury flashed across the face of 



VOICES BY THE WAY 483 

Andersen. He made a movement that caused his 
interlocutor to step hurriedly backwards. But the 
emotion passed as rapidly as it had come. 

"You would avoid everything," he said cunningly. 
" You would avoid everything you hate, if someone — 
myself for instance — or Luke — made it easy for you 
to save her from these houses and these churches! 
Luke will arrange it. He is not like us. He is wise. 
He knows the world. And you will only have to go 
on just as before, to burrow and twine! But you'll 
have done it. You'll have saved her from them. 
And then it will not matter how deep they bury me 
in the quarries of Leo's Hill!" 

"Is he drunk? Or is he not drunk?" Mr Quincunx 
wondered. The news of Andersen's derangement, 
though it had already run like wild-fire through the 
village, had not yet reached his ears. For the last 
few days he had walked both to and from his office, 
and had talked to no one. 

A remarkable peculiarity in this curious potato- 
digger was, however, his absolute and unvarying 
candour. Mr. Quincunx was prepared to discuss his 
most private concerns with any mortal or immortal 
visitor who stepped into his garden. He would have 
entered into a calm philosophical debate upon his 
love-affairs with a tramp, with a sailor, with the post- 
man, with the chimney-sweep, with the devil; or, 
as in this case, with his very rival in his sweetheart's 
affection! There was really something touching and 
sublime about this tendency of his. It indicated the 
presence, in Mr. Quincunx, of a certain mystical 
reverence for simple humanity, which completely 
contradicted his misanthropic cynicism. 



484 WOOD AND STONE 

"Certainly," he remarked, on this occasion, for- 
getting, in his interest in the subject, the recent 
strange outburst of his companion. "Certainly, if 
Lacrima and I had sufficient money to live upon, I 
would be inclined to risk marrying. You would 
advise me to, then; wouldn't you, Andersen? Anyone 
would advise me to, then. It would be absurd not 
to do it. Though, all the same, there are always 
great risks in two people living together, particularly 
nervous people, — such as we are. But what do you 
think, Andersen? Suppose some fairy god-mother did 
give us this money, would you advise us to risk it? 
Of course, we know, girls like a large house and a lot 
of servants! She wouldn't get that with me, because 
I hate those things, and wouldn't have them, even if 
I could afford it. What would you advise, Andersen, 
if some mad chance did make such a thing possible? 
Would it be worth the risk?" 

An additional motive, in the queerly constituted 
mind of the recluse, for making this extraordinary 
request, was the Pariah-like motive of wishing to 
propitiate the stone-carver. Parallel with his humor- 
ous love of shocking people, ran, through Mr. Quin- 
cunx's nature, the naive and innocent wish to win 
them over to his side; and his method of realizing this 
wish was to put himself completely at their mercy, 
laying his meanest thoughts bare, and abandoning 
his will to their will, so that for very shame they 
could not find it in them to injure him, but were 
softened, thrown off their guard, and disarmed. Mr. 
Quincunx knew no restraint in these confessions by 
the way, in these appeals to the voices and omens of 
casual encounter. He grew voluble, and even shame- 



VOICES BY THE WAY 485 

less. In quiet reaction afterwards, in the loneliness 
of his cottage, he was often led to regret with gloomy 
remorse the manner in which he had betrayed himself. 
It was then that he found himself hating, with the 
long-brooding hatred of a true solitary, the persons 
to whom he had exposed the recesses of his soul. At 
the moment of communicativeness, however, he was 
never able to draw rein or come to a pause. If he 
grew conscious that he was making a fool of himself, 
a curious demonic impulse in him only pressed him 
on to humiliate himself further. 

He derived a queer inverted pleasure from thus 
offering himself, stripped and naked, to the smiter. 
It was only afterwards, in the long hours of his loneli- 
ness, that the poison of his outraged pride festered 
and fermented, and a deadly malice possessed him 
towards the recipients of his confidences. There was 
something admirable about the manner in which this 
quaint man made, out of his very lack of resistant 
power, a sort of sanctity of dependence. But this 
triumph of weakness in him, this dissolution of the 
very citadel of his being, in so beautiful and mystical 
an abandonment to the sympathy of our common 
humanity, was attended by lamentable issues in its 
resultant hatred and malice. Had Mr. Quincunx 
been able to give himself up to this touching candour 
without these melancholy and misanthropic reactions, 
his temper would have been very nearly the temper 
of a saint; but the gall and wormwood of the hours 
that followed, the corroding energy of the goblin of 
malice that was born of such unnatural humiliations, 
put a grievous gulf between him and the heavenly 
condition. 



486 WOOD AND STONE 

It must also be remembered, in qualification of the 
outrageousness, one might almost say the indecency, 
of his appeal to Andersen, that he had not in the 
remotest degree realized the extent of the stone- 
carver's infatuation with the Italian. Neither physi- 
cal passion, nor ideal passion, were things that entered 
into his view of the relations between the sexes. 
Desire with him was of a strange and complicated 
subtlety, generally diffused into a mild and brooding 
sentiment. He was abnormally faithful, but at the 
same time abnormally cold; and though, very often, 
jealousy bit him like a viper, it was a jealousy of the 
mind, not a jealousy of the senses. 

What in other people would have been gross and 
astounding cynicism, was in Mr. Quincunx a perfectly 
simple and even child-like recognition of elemental 
facts. He could sweep aside every conventional 
mask and plunge into the very earth-mould of reality, 
but he was quite unconscious of any shame, or any 
merit, in so doing. He simply envisaged facts, and 
stated the facts he envisaged, without the conven- 
tional unction of worldly discretion. This being so, 
it was in no ironic extravagance that he appealed to 
Andersen, but quite innocently, and without con- 
sciousness of anything unusual. 

Of the two men, some might have supposed, 
considering the circumstances, that it was Mr. Quin- 
cunx who was mad, and his interlocutor who was 
sane. On the other hand, it might be said that only 
a madman would have received the recluse's appeal 
in the calm and serious manner in which Andersen 
received it. The abysmal cunning of those who have 
only one object in life, and are in sight of its attain- 



VOICES BY THE WAY 487 

ment, actuated the unfortunate stone-carver in his 
attitude to his rival at this moment. 

"If some fairy or some god," he said, "did lift the 
stone from her sepulchre and you from your sepulchre, 
my advice to you and to her would be to go away, 
to escape, to be free. You would be happy — you 
would both be happy! And the reason of your 
happiness would be that you would know the Devil 
had been conquered. And you would know that, 
because, by gathering all the stones in the world upon 
my own head, and being buried beneath them, I 
should have made a rampart higher than Leo's Hill 
to protect you from the Evil One!" 

Andersen's words were eager and hurried, and when 
he had finished speaking, he surveyed Mr. Quincunx 
with wild and feverish eyes. It was now borne in 
for the first time upon that worthy philosopher, that 
he was engaged in conversation with one whose wits 
were turned, and a great terror took possession of him. 
If the cunning of madmen is deep and subtle, it is 
sometimes surpassed by the cunning of those who are 
afraid of madmen. 

"The most evil heap of stones I know in Nevilton," 
remarked Mr. Quincunx, moving towards his gate, 
and making a slight dismissing gesture with his hand, 
"is the heap in the Methodist cemetery. You know 
the one I mean, Andersen? The one up by Seven 
Ashes, where the four roads meet. It is just inside 
the entrance, on the left hand. They throw upon it 
all the larger stones they find when they dig the 
graves. I have often picked up bits of bones there, 
and pieces of skulls. It is an interesting place, a 
very curious place, and quite easy to find. There 



488 WOOD AND STONE 

haven't been many burials there lately, because most 
of the Methodists nowadays prefer the churchyard. 
But there was one last spring. That was the burial 
of Glory Lintot. I was there myself, and saw her 
put in. It's an extraordinary place. Anyone who 
likes to look at what people can write on tombstones 
would be delighted with it." 

By this time, by means of a series of vague ushering 
movements, such as he might have used to get rid of 
an admirable but dangerous dog, Mr. Quincunx had 
got his visitor as far as the gate. This he opened, 
with as easy and natural an air as he could assume, 
and stood ostentatiously aside, to let the unfortunate 
man pass out. 

James Andersen moved slowly into the road. 
"Remember!" he said. "You will avoid everything 
you hate! There's more in the west- wind than you 
imagine, these strange days. That's why the rooks 
are calling. Listen to them!" 

He waved his hand and strode rapidly up the lane. 

Mr. 'Quincunx gazed after the retreating figure till 
it disappeared, and then returned wearily to his work. 
He picked up his hoe and leaned heavily upon it, 
buried in thought. Thus he remained for the space 
of several minutes. 

"He is right," he muttered, raising his head at 
last. "The rooks are beginning to gather. That 
means another summer is over, — and a good thing, 
too! I suppose I ought to have taken him back to 
Nevilton. But he is right about the rooks." 



CHAPTER XIX 
PLANETARY INTERVENTION 

THE long summer afternoon was nearly over by 
the time James Andersen reached the Seven 
Ashes. The declining sun had sunk so low 
that it was invisible from the spot where he stood, 
but its last horizontal rays cast a warm ruddy light 
over the tree-tops in the valley. The high and 
exposed intersection of sandy lanes, which for time 
immemorial had borne this title, was, at the epoch 
which concerns us, no longer faithful to its name. 

The ash-trees which Andersen now surveyed, with 
the feverish glance of mental obsession, were not 
seven in number. They were indeed only three; and, 
of these three, one was no more than a time-worn 
stump, and the others but newly-planted saplings. 
Such as they were, however, they served well enough 
to continue the tradition of the place, and their 
presence enhanced with a note of added melancholy 
the gloomy character of the scene. 

Seven Ashes, with its cross-roads, formed indeed 
the extreme northern angle of the high winding ridge 
which terminated at Wild Pine. Approached from 
the road leading to this latter spot, — a road darkened 
on either hand by wind-swept Scotch-firs — it was 
the sort of place where, in less civilized times, one 
might have expected to encounter a threatening 
highwayman^ or at least to have stumbled upon 



490 WOOD AND STONE 

some sinister witch-figure stooping over an unholy 
task or groping among the weeds. Even in modern 
times and in bright sunshine the spot was not one 
where a traveller was induced to linger upon his way 
or to rest himself. When overcast, as it was at the 
moment of Andersen's approach, by the coming on of 
twilight, it was a place from which a normal-minded 
person would naturally be in haste to turn. There 
was something ominous in its bleak exposure to the 
four quarters of the sky, and something full of ghostly 
suggestiveness in the gaping mouths of the narrow 
lanes that led away from it. 

There was, however, another and a much more 
definite justification for the quickening, at this point, 
of any wayfarer's steps who knew the locality. A 
stranger to the place, glancing across an empty field, 
would have observed with no particular interest the 
presence of a moderately high stone wall protecting 
a small square enclosure. Were such a one acquainted 
with the survivals of old usage in English villages, he 
might have supposed these walls to shut in the now 
unused space of what was formerly the local "pound," 
or repository for stray animals. Such travellers as 
were familiar with Nevilton knew, however, that 
sequestered within this citadel of desolation were no 
living horses nor cattle, but very different and much 
quieter prisoners. The Methodist cemetery there, 
dates back, it is said, to the days of religious persecu- 
tion, to the days of Whitfield and Wesley, if not even 
further. 

Our fugitive from the society of those who regard 
their minds as normally constituted, cast an excited 
and recognizant eye upon this forlorn enclosure. 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 491 

Plucking a handful of leaves from one of the ash- 
trees and thrusting them into his pocket, some queer 
legend — half -remembered in his agitated state — im- 
pelling him to this quaint action, he left the road- 
way, crossed the field, and pushing open the rusty- 
iron gate of the little burying-ground, burst hurriedly 
in among its weather-stained memorials of the 
dead. 

Though not of any great height, the enclosing walls 
of the place were sufficient to intensify by several 
degrees the gathering shadows. Outside, in the open 
field, one would have anticipated a clear hour of 
twilight before the darkness fell; but here, among 
the graves of these humble recalcitrants against 
spiritual authority, it seemed as though the plunge 
of the planet into its diurnal obscuring was likely to 
be retarded for only a few brief moments. 

James Andersen sat down upon a nameless mound, 
and fixed his gaze upon the heap of stones referred 
to by Mr. Quincunx. The evening was warm and 
still, and though the sky yet retained much of its 
lightness of colour, the invading darkness — like a 
beast on padded feet — was felt as a palpable presence 
moving slowly among the tombs. 

The stone-carver began muttering in a low voice 
scattered and incoherent repetitions of his conversa- 
tion with the potato-digger. But his voice suddenly 
died away under a startling interruption. He be- 
came aware that the heavy cemetery gate was being 
pushed open from outside. 

Such is the curious law regulating the action of 
human nerves, and making them dependent upon 
the mood of the mind to which they are attached, 



492 WOOD AND STONE 

that an event which to a normal consciousness is 
fraught with ghostly terror, to a consciousness already 
strained beyond the breaking point, appears as some- 
thing natural and ordinary. It is one of the privi- 
leges of mania, that those thus afflicted should be 
freed from the normal oppression of human terror. 
A madman would take a ghost into his arms. 

On this occasion, however, the most normal nerves 
would have suffered no shock from the figure that 
presented itself in the entrance when the door was 
fully opened. A young girl, pale and breathless, 
rushed impulsively into the cemetery, and catching 
sight of Andersen at once, hastened straight to him 
across the grave-mounds. 

"I was coming back from the village," she gasped, 
preventing him with a trembling pressure of her hand 
from rising from his seat, and casting herself down 
beside him, "and I met Mr. Clavering. He told me 
you had gone off somewhere and I guessed at once 
it was to Dead Man's Lane. I said nothing to him, 
but as soon as he had left me, I ran nearly all the 
way to the cottage. The gentleman there told me 
to follow you. He said it was on his conscience that 
he had advised you to come up here. He said he 
was just making up his mind to come on after you, 
but he thought it was better for me to come. So 
here I am ! James — dear James — you are not really 
ill are you? They frightened me, those two, by what 
they said. They seemed to be afraid that you would 
hurt yourself if you went off alone. But you wouldn't 
James dear, would you? You would think of me a 
little?" 

She knelt at his side and tenderly pushed back the 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 493 

hair from his brow. "Oh I love you so!" she mur- 
mured, "I love you so! It would kill me if anything 
dreadful happened to you." She pressed his head 
passionately against her breast, hardly conscious in 
her emotion of the burning heat of his forehead as 
it touched her skin. 

"You will think of me a little!" she pleaded, 
"you will take care of yourself for my sake, Jim?" 

She held him thus, pressed tightly against her, for 
several seconds, while her bosom rose and fell in 
quick spasms of convulsive pity. She had torn off 
her hat in her agitation, and flung it heedlessly down 
at her feet, and a heavy tress of her thick auburn 
hair — colourless now as the night itself — fell loosely 
upon her bowed neck. The fading light from the 
sky above them seemed to concentrate itself upon 
the ivory pallor of her clasped fingers and the dead- 
white glimmer of her impassioned face. She might 
have risen out of one of the graves that surrounded 
them, so ghostly in the gloom did her figure look. 

The stone-carver freed himself at length, and took 
her hands in his own. The shock of the girl's emo- 
tion had quieted his own fever. From the touch of 
her flesh he seemed to have derived a new and rational 
calm. 

"Little Ninsy!" he whispered. "Little Ninsy! It 
is not I, but you, who are ill. Have you been up, 
and about, many days? I didn't know it! I've had 
troubles of my own." He passed his hand across his 
forehead. "I've had dreams, dreams and fancies! 
I'm afraid I've made a fool of myself, and fright- 
ened all sorts of people. I think I must have been 
saying a lot of silly things today. My head feels 



494 WOOD AND STONE 

still queer. It's hurt me so much lately, my head! 
And I've heard voices, voices that wouldn't stop." 

" Oh James, my darling, my darling!" cried the girl, 
in a great passion of relief. "I knew what they said 
wasn't true. I knew you would speak gently to me, 
and be your old self. Love me, James! Love me as 
you used to in the old days." 

She rose to her feet and pulled him up upon his. 
Then with a passionate abandonment she flung her 
arms round him and pressed him to her, clinging to 
him with all her force and trembling as she clung. 

James yielded to her emotion more spontaneously 
than he had ever done in his life. Their lips met in 
a long indrawing kiss which seemed to merge their 
separate identities, and blend them indissolubly 
together. She clung to him as a bind-weed, with its 
frail white flowers, might cling to a stalk of swaying 
corn, and not unlike such an entwined stalk, he 
swayed to and fro under the clinging of her limbs. 
The passion which possessed her communicated 
itself to him, and in a strange ecstasy of oblivion he 
embraced her as desperately as her wild love could 
wish. 

From sheer exhaustion their lips parted at last, 
and they sank down, side by side, upon the dew- 
drenched grass, making the grave-mount their pil- 
low. Obscurely, through the clouded chamber of 
his brain, passed the image of her poppy-scarlet 
mouth burning against the whiteness of her skin. 
All that he could now actually see of her face, in the 
darkness, was its glimmering pallor, but the feeling 
of her kiss remained and merged itself in this im- 
pression. He lay on his back with closed eyes, and 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 495 

she bent over him as he lay, and began kissing him 
again, as if her soul would never be satisfied. In the 
intervals of her kisses, she pressed her fingers against 
his forehead, and uttered incoherent and tender 
whispers. It seemed to her as though, by the very 
magnetism of her devotion, she must be able to restore 
his shattered wits. 

Nor did her efforts seem in vain. After a while 
the stone-carver lifted himself up and looked round 
him. He smiled affectionately at Ninsy and patted 
her, almost playfully, upon the knee. 

"You have done me good, child," he said. "You 
have done me more good than you know. I don't 
think I shall say any more silly things tonight." 

He stood up on his feet, heaved a deep, natural 
sigh, and stretched himself, as one roused from a long 
sleep. 

"What have you managed to do to me, Ninsy?" 
he asked. "I feel completely different. Those 
voices in my head have stopped." He turned ten- 
derly towards her. "I believe you've driven the evil 
spirit out of me, child," he said. 

She flung her arms round him with a gasping cry. 
"You do like me a little, Jim? Oh my darling, I love 
you so much! I love you! I love you!" She clung 
to him with frenzied passion, her breast convulsed 
with sobs, and the salt tears mingling with her 
kisses. 

Suddenly, as he held her body in his arms, he felt 
a shuddering tremor run through her, from head to 
foot. Her head fell back, helpless and heavy, and 
her whole frame hung limp and passive upon his 
arm. It almost seemed as though, in exorcising, by 



496 WOOD AND STONE 

the magnetic power of her love, the demon that 
possessed him, she had broken her own heart. 

Andersen was overwhelmed with alarm and remorse. 
He laid her gently upon the ground, and chafed the 
palms of her hands whispering her name and uttering 
savage appeals to Providence. His appeals, however, 
remained unanswered, and she lay deadly still, her 
coils of dusky hair spread loose over the wet 
grass. 

He rose in mute dismay, and stared angrily round 
the cemetery, as if demanding assistance from its 
silent population. Then with a glance at her motion- 
less form, he ran quickly to the open gate and 
shouted loudly for help. His voice echoed hollowly 
through the walled enclosure, and a startled flutter 
of wings rose from the distant fir-trees. Somewhere 
down in the valley, a dog began to bark, but no 
other answer to his repeated cry reached his ears. 
He returned to the girl's side. 

Frantically he rent open her dress at the throat 
and tore with trembling fingers at the laces of her 
bodice. He pressed his hand against her heart. A 
faint, scarcely discernible tremor under her soft 
breast reassured him. She was not dead, then! He 
had not killed her with his madness. 

He bent down and made an effort to lift her in 
his arms, but his limbs trembled beneath him and 
his muscles collapsed helplessly. The reaction from 
the tempest in his brain had left him weak as an 
infant. In this wretched inability to do anything 
to restore her he burst into a fit of piteous tears, and 
struck his forehead with his clenched hand. 

Once more he tried desperately to lift her, and 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 497 

once more, fragile as she was, the effort proved 
hopelessly beyond his strength. Suddenly, out of 
the darkness beyond the cemetery gate, he heard the 
sound of voices. 

He shouted as loudly as he could and then listened 
intently, with beating heart. An answering shout 
responded, in Luke's well-known voice. A moment 
or two later, and Luke himself, followed by Mr. 
Quincunx, hurried into the cemetery. 

Immediately after Ninsy's departure the recluse 
had been seized with uncontrollable remorse. Mixed 
with his remorse was the disturbing consciousness that 
since Ninsy knew he had advised Andersen to make 
his way to Seven Ashes, the knowledge was ultimately 
sure to reach the younger brother's ears. Luke was 
one of the few intimates Mr. Quincunx possessed in 
Nevilton. The recluse held him in curious respect 
as a formidable and effective man of the world. He 
had an exaggerated notion of his power. He had 
grown accustomed to his evening visits. He was 
fond of him and a little afraid of him. 

It was therefore an extremely disagreeable thought 
to his mind, to conceive of Luke as turning upon 
him with contempt and indignation. Thus impelled, 
the perturbed solitary had summoned up all his 
courage and gone boldly down into the village to 
find the younger Andersen. He had met him at the 
gate of Mr. Taxater's house. 

Left behind in the station field by James and his 
pursuers, Luke had reverted for a while with the 
conscious purpose of distracting his mind, to his old 
preoccupation, and had spent the afternoon in a 
manner eminently congenial, making love to two 



498 WOOD AND STONE 

damsels at the same time, and parrying with evasive 
urbanity their combined recriminations. 

At the close of the afternoon, having chatted for 
an hour with the station-master's wife, and shared 
their family tea, he had made his way according to 
his promise, into Mr. Taxater's book-lined study, 
and there, closely closeted with the papal champion, 
had smoothed out the final threads of the conspiracy 
that was to betray Gladys and liberate Lacrima. 

Luke had been informed by Mr. Quincunx of every 
detail of James' movements and of Ninsy's appearance 
on the scene. The recluse, as the reader may believe, 
did not spare himself in any point. He even exagger- 
ated his fear of the agitated stone-carver, and as they 
hastened together towards Seven Ashes, he narrated, 
down to the smallest particular, the strange conver- 
sation they had had in his potato-garden. 

"Why do you suppose," he enquired of Luke, as 
they ascended the final slope of the hill, "he talked 
so much of someone giving me money? Who, on 
earth, is likely to give me money? People don't as 
a rule throw money about, like that, do they? And 
if they did, I am the last person they would throw it 
to. I am the sort of person that kind and good 
people naturally hate. It's because they know I 
know the deep little vanities and cunning selfishness 
in their blessed deeds. 

" No one in this world really acts from pure motives. 
We are all grasping after our own gain. We are all 
pleased when other people come to grief, and sorry 
when things go well with them. It's human nature, 
that's what it is! Human nature is always vicious. 
It was human nature in me that made me send your 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 499 

brother up this hill, instead of taking him back to 
the village. It was human nature in you that made 
you curse me as you did, when I first told you." 

Luke did his best to draw Mr. Quincunx back from 
these general considerations to his conversation with 
James. 

"What did you say," he enquired, "when he asked 
you about marrying Lacrima, supposing this imagi- 
nary kind person were available? Did you tell him 
you would do it?" 

"You mean, was he really jealous?" replied the 
other, with one of his goblin-like laughs. 

"It was a strange question to ask," pursued Luke. 
"I can't imagine how you answered it." 

"Of course," said Mr. Quincunx, "we know very 
well what he was driving at. He wanted to sound 
me. Whatever may be wrong with him he was 
clever enough to want to sound me. We are all like 
that! We are all going about the world trying to 
find out each other's weakest points, with the idea 
that it may be useful to us to know them, so as to 
be able to stick knives into them when we want to." 

"It was certainly rather a strange question con- 
sidering that he is a bit attracted to Lacrima him- 
self," remarked Luke. "I should think you were 
very cautious how you answered." 

"Cautious?" replied Mr. Quincunx. "I don't be- 
lieve in caution. Caution is a thing for well-to-do 
people who have something to lose. I answered him 
exactly as I would answer anyone. I said I should 
be a fool not to agree. And so I should. Don't you 
think so, Andersen? I should be a fool not to marry, 
under such circumstances?" 



500 WOOD AND STONE 

"It depends what your feelings are towards Lac- 
rima," answered the wily stone-carver. 

"Why do you say that, in that tone?" said the 
recluse sharply. "You know very well what I feel 
towards Lacrima. Everyone knows. She is the one 
little streak of romance that the gods have allowed 
to cross my path. She is my only girl-friend in 
Nevilton." 

At that moment the two men reached Seven Ashes 
and the sound of their voices was carried to the ceme- 
tery, with the result already narrated. 

It will be remarked as an interesting exception to 
the voluble candour of Mr. Quincunx, that in his 
conversation with Luke he avoided all mention of 
Lacrima's fatal contract with Mr. Romer. He had 
indeed, on an earlier occasion, approached the out- 
skirts of this affair, in an indirect manner and with 
much manoeuvring. From what he had hinted then, 
Luke had formed certain shrewd surmises, in the 
direction of the truth, but of the precise facts he 
remained totally ignorant. 

The shout for help which interrupted this discus- 
sion gave the two men a shock of complete surprise. 
They were still more surprised, when on entering 
the cemetery they found James standing over the 
apparently lifeless form of Ninsy Lintot, her clothes 
torn and her hair loose and dishevelled. Their as- 
tonishment reached its climax when they noticed the 
sane and rational way in which the stone-carver 
addressed them. He was in a state of pitiful agita- 
tion, but he was no longer mad. 

By dint of their united efforts they carried the girl 
across the field, and laid her down beneath the ash- 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 501 

trees. The fresher air of this more exposed spot 
had an immediate effect upon her. She breathed 
heavily, and her fingers, under the caress of James' 
hands, lost their rigidity. Across her shadowy white 
face a quiver passed, and her head moved a little. 

"Ninsy! Ninsy, dear!" murmured Andersen as he 
knelt by her side. By the light of the clear stars, 
which now filled the sky with an almost tropical 
splendour, the three men gazing anxiously at her 
face saw her eyes slowly open and her lips part in 
a tender recognitory smile. 

"Thank God!" cried James, "You are better now, 
Ninsy, aren't you? Here is Luke and Mr. Quincunx. 
They came to find us. They'll help me to get you 
safe home." 

The girl murmured some indistinct and broken 
phrase. She smiled again, but a pathetic attempt 
she made to lift her hand to her throat proved her 
helpless weakness. Tenderly, as a mother might, 
James anticipated her movement, and restored to as 
natural order as he could her torn and ruffled 
dress. 

At that moment to the immense relief of the three 
watchers the sound of cart-wheels became audible. 
The vehicle proved to be a large empty wagon driven 
by one of Mr Goring's men on the way back from 
an outlying hamlet. They all knew the driver, who 
pulled up at once at their appeal. 

On an extemporized couch at the bottom of the 
wagon, made of the men's coats, — Mr. Quincunx 
being the first to offer his, — they arranged the girl's 
passive form as comfortably as the rough vehicle 
allowed. And then, keeping the horses at a walking- 



502 WOOD AND STONE 

pace, they proceeded along the lane towards Wild 
Pine. 

For some while, as he walked by the cart's side, 
his hand upon its well-worn edge, James experienced 
extreme weariness and lassitude. His legs shook 
under him and his heart palpitated. The demon 
which had been driven out of him, had left him, it 
seemed, like his biblical prototype, exhausted and 
half-dead. By the time, however, that they reached 
the corner, where Root-Thatch Lane descends to the 
village, and Nevil's Gully commences, the cool air 
of the night and the slow monotonous movement 
had restored a considerable portion of his strength. 

None of the men, as they went along, had felt in 
a mood for conversation. Luke had spent his time, 
naming to himself, with his accustomed interest in 
such phenomena, the various familiar constellations 
which shone down upon them between the dark 
boughs of the Scotch-firs. 

The thoughts of Mr. Quincunx were confused and 
strange. He had fallen into one of his self-condemna- 
tory moods, and like a solemn ghost moving by his 
side, a grim projection of his inmost identity kept 
rebuking and threatening him. As with most retired 
persons, whose lives are passed in an uninterrupted 
routine, the shock of any unusual or unforseen acci- 
dent fell upon him with a double weight. 

He had been much more impressed by the wild 
agitation of James, and by the sight of Ninsy's un- 
conscious and prostrate figure, than anyone who 
knew only the cynical side of him would have sup- 
posed possible. The cynicism of Mr. Quincunx was 
indeed strictly confined to philosophical conversation. 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 503 

In practical life he was wont to encounter any sudden 
or tragic occurrence with the unsophisticated sensi- 
tiveness of a child. As with many other sages, whose 
philosophical proclivities are rather instinctive than 
rational, Mr. Quincunx was liable to curious lapses 
into the most simple and superstitious misgivings. 

The influence of their slow and mute advance, 
under the majestic heavens, may have had some- 
thing to do with this reaction, but it is certain that 
this other Mr. Quincunx — this shadowy companion 
with no cabbage-leaf under his hat — pointed a most 
accusing finger at him. Before they reached Nevil's 
Gully, the perturbed recluse had made up his mind 
that, at all costs, he would intervene to prevent this 
scandalous union of his friend with John Goring. 
Contract or no contract, he must exert himself in 
some definite and overt manner to stave off this 
outrage. 

To his startled conscience the sinister figure of 
Mr. Romer seemed to extend itself, Colossus-like, 
from the outstretched neck of Cygnus, the heavenly 
Swan, to the low-hung brilliance of the "lord-star" 
Jupiter, and accompanying this Satanic shadow across 
his vision, was a horrible and most realistic image of 
the frail Italian, struggling in vain against the brutal 
advances of Mr. Goring. He seemed to see Lacrima, 
lying helpless, as Ninsy had been lying, but with no 
protecting forms grouped reassuringly around her. 

The sense of the pitiful helplessness of these girlish 
beings, thrust by an indifferent fate into the midst 
of life's brute forces, had pierced his conscience with 
an indelible stab when first he had seen her prostrate 
in the cemetery. For a vague transitory moment, 



504 WOOD AND STONE 

he had wondered then, whether his sending her in 
pursuit of a madman had resulted in a most lamen- 
table tragedy; and though Andersen's manner had 
quickly reassured him as it had simultaneously reas- 
sured Luke, the original impression of the shock 
remained. 

At that moment, as he helped to lift Ninsy out of 
the wagon, and carry her through the farm-yard to 
her father's cottage, the cynical recluse felt an almost 
quixotic yearning to put himself to any inconvenience 
and sacrifice any comfort, if only one such soft 
feminine creature as he supported now in his arms, 
might be spared the contact of gross and violating 
hands. 

James Andersen, as well as Mr. Quincunx, remained 
silent during their return towards the village. In 
vain Luke strove to lift off from them this oppression 
of pensive and gentle melancholy. Neither his stray 
bits of astronomical pedantry, nor his Rabelaisean 
jests at the expense of a couple of rural amorists 
they stumbled upon in the over-shadowed descent, 
proved arresting enough to break his companion's 
silence. 

At the bottom of Root-Thatch Lane Mr. Quincunx 
separated from the brothers. His way led directly 
through the upper portion of the village to the Yeo- 
borough road, while that of the Andersens passed 
between the priory and the church. 

The clock in St. Catharine's tower was striking 
ten as the two brothers moved along under the 
churchyard wall. With the departure of Mr. Quin- 
cunx James seemed to recover his normal spirits. 
This recovery was manifested in a way that rejoiced 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 505 

the heart of Luke, so congruous was it with all their 
old habits and associations; but to a stranger over- 
hearing the words, it would have seemed the reverse 
of promising. 

"Shall we take a glance at the grave?" the elder 
brother suggested, leaning his elbows on the moss- 
grown wall. Luke assented with alacrity, and the 
ancient stones of the wall lending themselves easily 
to such a proceeding, they both clambered over into 
the place of tombs. 

Thus within the space of forty-eight hours the 
brothers Andersen had been together in no less than 
three sepulchral enclosures. One might have sup- 
posed that the same destiny that made of their 
father a kind of modern Old Mortality — less pious, it 
is true, than his prototype, but not less addicted to 
invasions of the unprotesting dead — had made it 
inevitable that the most critical moments of his sons' 
lives should be passed in the presence of these mute 
witnesses. 

They crossed over to where the head-stone of 
their parents' grave rose, gigantic and imposing in 
the clear star light, as much larger than the other 
monuments as the beaver, into which Pau-Puk- 
Keewis changed himself, was larger than the other 
beavers. They sat down on a neighbouring mound 
and contemplated in silence their father's work. The 
dark dome of the sky above them, strewn with 
innumerable points of glittering light, attracted Luke 
once more to his old astronomical speculations. 

"I have an idea," he said, "that there is more in 
the influence of these constellations than even the 
astrologers have guessed. Their method claims to be 



506 WOOD AND STONE 

a scientific one, mathematical in the exactness of its 
inferences. My feeling about the matter is, that 
there is something much more arbitrary, much more 
living and wayward, in the manner in which they 
work their will upon us. I said 'constellations,' 
but I don't believe, as a matter of fact, that it is 
from them at all that the influences come. The 
natural and obvious thing is that the 'planets should 
affect us, and affect us very much in the same way 
as we affect one another. The ancient races recog- 
nized this difference. The fixed stars are named 
after animals, or inanimate objects, or after power- 
ful, but not more than human, heroes. The planets 
are all named from immortal gods, and it is as gods, 
— as wilful and arbitrary gods — that they influence 
our destinies." 

James Andersen surveyed the large and brilliant 
star which at that moment hung, like an enormous 
glow-worm, against the southern slope of Nevilton 
Mount. 

"Some extremely evil planet must have been very 
active during these last weeks with Lacrima and with 
me," he remarked. "Don't get alarmed, my dear," 
he added, noticing the look of apprehension which 
his brother turned upon him. "I shan't worry you 
with any more silly talk. Those voices in my head 
have quite ceased. But that does not help Lacrima." 
He laughed a sad little laugh. 

"I suppose," he added, "no one can help her in 
this devilish situation, — except that queer fellow 
who's just left us. I would let him step over my 
dead body, if he would only carry her off and fool 
them all!" 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 507 

Luke's mind plunged into a difficult problem. His 
brother's wits were certainly restored, and he seemed 
calm and clear-headed. But was he clear-headed 
enough to learn the details of the curious little con- 
spiracy which Mr. Taxater's diplomatic brain had 
evolved? How would this somewhat ambiguous 
transaction strike so romantic a nature as his? 

Luke hesitated and pondered, the tall dark tower 
of St. Catharine's Church affording him but scant 
inspiration, as it rose above them into the starlit 
sky. Should he tell him or should he keep the matter 
to himself, and enter into some new pretended scheme 
with his brother, to occupy his mind and distract it, 
for the time being? 

So long did he remain silent, pondering this ques- 
tion, that James, observing his absorbed state and 
concluding that his subtle intelligence was occupied 
in devising some way out of their imbroglio, gave 
up all thought of receiving an answer, and moving 
to a less dew-drenched resting-place, leaned his head 
against an upright monument and closed his eyes. 
The feeling that his admired brother was taking 
Lacrima's plight so seriously in hand filled him with 
a reassuring calm, and he had not long remained in 
his new position before his exhausted senses found 
relief in sleep. 

Left to himself, Luke weighed in his mind every 
conceivable aspect of the question at stake. Less 
grave and assured than the metaphysical Mr. Taxater 
in this matter of striking at evil persons with evil 
weapons, Luke was not a whit less unscrupulous. 

No Quincunx-like visitings of compunction had fol- 
lowed, with him, their rescue of Ninsy. If the scene 



508 WOOD AND STONE 

at Seven Ashes had printed any impression at all 
upon his volatile mind, it was merely a vague and 
agreeable sense of how beautiful the girl's dead- 
white skin had looked, contrasted with the disturbed 
masses of her dusky hair. Beyond this, except for a 
pleasant memory of how lightly and softly she had 
lain upon his arm, as he helped to carry her across 
the Wild Pine barton, the occurrence had left him 
unaffected. 

His conscience did not trouble him in the smallest 
degree with regard to Gladys. According to Luke's 
philosophy of life, things in this world resolved 
themselves into a reckless hand-to-hand struggle be- 
tween opposing personalities, every one of them seek- 
ing, with all the faculties at his disposal, to get the 
better of the others. It was absurd to stop and 
consider such illusive impediments as sentiment or 
honour, when the great, casual, indifferent universe 
which surrounds us knows nothing of these things! 

Out of the depths of this chaotic universe he, Luke 
Andersen, had been flung. It must be his first con- 
cern to sweep aside, as irrelevant and meaningless, 
any mere human fancies, ill-based and adventitious, 
upon which his free foot might stumble. To strike 
craftily and boldly in defence of the person he loved 
best in the world seemed to him not only natural but 
commendable. How should he be content to indulge 
in vague sentimental shilly-shallying, when the whole 
happiness of his beloved Daddy James was at stake? 

The difference between Luke's attitude to their 
mutual conspiracy, and that of Mr. Taxater, lay in 
the fact that to the latter the whole event was 
merely part of an elaborate, deeply-involved cam- 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 509 

paign, whose ramifications extended indefinitely on 
every side; while to the former the affair was only one 
of those innumerable chaotic struggles that a whimsi- 
cal world delighted to evoke. 

An inquisitive observer might have wondered what 
purpose Mr. Taxater had in mixing himself up in 
the affair at all. This question of his fellow-con- 
spirator's motive crossed, as a matter of fact, Luke's 
own mind, as his gaze wandered negligently from the 
Greater to the Lesser Bear, and from Orion to the 
Pleiades. He came to the characteristic conclusion 
that it was no quixotic impulse that had impelled 
this excellent man, but a completely conscious and 
definite desire — the desire to add yet one more wan- 
derer to his list of converts to the Faith. 

Lacrima was an Italian and a Catholic. United to 
Mr. Quincunx, might she not easily win over that 
dreamy infidel to the religion of her fathers? Luke 
smiled to himself as he thought how little the papal 
champion could have known the real character of 
the solitary of Dead Man's Lane. Sooner might the 
sea at Weymouth flow inland, and wash with its 
waves the foot of Leo's Hill, than this ingrained 
mystic bow his head under the yoke of dogmatic 
truth! 

After long cogitation with himself, Luke came to 
the conclusion that it would be wiser, on the whole, 
to say nothing to his brother of his plan to work out 
Lacrima's release by means of her cousin's betrayal. 
Having arrived at this conclusion he rose and stretched 
himself, and glanced at the sleeping James. 

The night was warm and windless, but Luke began 
to feel anxious lest the cold touch of the stone, upon 



510 WOOD AND STONE 

which his brother rested, should strike a chill into 
his blood. At the same time he was extremely loth 
to disturb so placid and wholesome a slumber. He 
laid his hand upon the portentous symbol of mor- 
tality which crowned so aggressively his parents' 
monument, and looked round him. His vigil had 
already been interrupted more than once by the 
voices of late revellers leaving the Goat and Boy. 
Such voices still recurred, at intermittent moments, 
followed by stumbling drunken footsteps, but in the 
intervals the silence only fell the deeper. 

Suddenly he observed, or fancied he observed, the 
aspect of a figure extremely familiar to him, standing 
patiently outside the inn door. He hurried across 
the churchyard and looked over the wall. No, he 
had not been mistaken. There, running her hands 
idly through the leaves of the great wistaria which 
clung to the side of the house, stood his little friend 
Phyllis. She had evidently been sent by her mother, 
— as younger maids than she were often sent — to 
assist, upon their homeward journey, the unsteady 
steps of Bill Santon the carter. 

Luke turned and glanced at his brother. He could 
distinguish his motionless form, lying as still as ever, 
beyond the dark shape of his father's formidable 
tombstone. There was no need to disturb him yet. 
The morrow was Sunday, and they could therefore 
be as late as they pleased. 

He called softly to the patient watcher. She 
started violently at hearing his voice, and turning 
round, peered into the darkness. By degrees she 
made out his form, and waved her hand to him. 

He beckoned her to approach. She shook her head, 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 511 

and indicated by a gesture that she was expecting 
the appearance of her father. Once more he called 
her, making what seemed to her, in the obscurity, 
a sign that he had something important to communi- 
cate. Curiosity overcame piety in the heart of the 
daughter of Bill Santon and she ran across the road. 

"Why, you silly thing!" whispered the crafty Luke, 
"your father's been gone this half hour! He went a 
bit of the way home with Sam Lintot. Old Sam will 
find a nice little surprise waiting for him when he 
gets back. I reckon he'll send your father home-along 
sharp enough." 

It was Luke's habit, in conversation with the vil- 
lagers, to drop lightly into many of their provincial 
phrases, though both he and his brother used, thanks 
to their mother's training, as good English as any of 
the gentlefolk of Nevilton. 

The influence of association in the matter of 
language might have afforded endless interesting 
matter to the student of words, supposing such a 
one had been able to overhear the conversations of 
these brothers with their various acquaintances. Poor 
Ninsy, for instance, fell naturally into the local dialect 
when she talked to James in her own house; and as- 
sumed, with equal facility, her loved one's more 
colourless manner of speech, when addressing him on 
ground less familiar to her. 

As a matter of fact the universal spread of board- 
school education in .that corner of the country had 
begun to sap the foundations of the old local peculi- 
arities. Where these survived, in the younger genera- 
tion, they survived side by side with the newer tricks 
of speech. The Andersens' girl-friends were, all of 



512 WOOD AND STONE 

them, in reality, expert bilinguists. They spoke 
the King's English, and they spoke the Nevilton 
English, with equal ease, if with unequal expres- 
siveness. 

The shrewd fillip to her curiosity, which Luke's 
reference to Lintot's home-coming had given, allured 
Phyllis into accepting without protest his audacious 
invention about her father. The probability of such 
an occurrence seemed sealed with certainty, when 
turning, at a sign from her friend, she saw, against 
the lighted window the burly form of the landlord 
engaged in closing his shutters. It was not the custom, 
as Phyllis well knew, of this methodical dispenser of 
Dionysian joys to "shutter up house," as he called 
it, until every guest had departed. How could she 
guess — little deluded maid ! — that, stretched upon 
the floor in the front parlor, stared at by the land- 
lord's three small sons, was the comatose body of 
her worthy parent breathing like one of Mr. Goring's 
pigs? 

"Tain't no good my waiting here then," she whis- 
pered. "What do 'ee mean by Sam Lintot's being 
surprised-like? Be Ninsy taken with her heart 
again?" 

"Let me help you over here," answered the stone- 
carver, "that Priory wench was talking, just now, 
just across yon wall. She'll be hearing what we say 
if we don't move on a bit." 

"Us don't mind what a maid like her do hear, do 
us, Luke dear?" whispered the girl in answer. "Give 
me a kiss, sonny, and let me be getting home- 
along!" 

She stood on tiptoe and raised her hands over the 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 513 

top of the wall. Luke seized her wrists, and retained 
them in a vicious clutch. 

"Put your foot into one of those holes," he said, 
"and we'll soon have you across." 

Unwilling to risk a struggle in such a spot, and not 
really at all disinclined for an adventure, the girl 
obeyed him, and after being hoisted up upon the 
wall, was lifted quickly down on the other side, and 
enclosed in Luke's gratified arms. The amorous 
stone-carver remembered long afterwards the peculiar 
thrill of almost chaste pleasure which the first touch 
of her cold cheeks gave him, as she yielded to his 
embrace. 

"is Nin Lintot bad again?" she enquired, drawing 
herself away at last. 

Luke nodded. "You won't see her about, this 
week — or next week — or the week after," he said. 
"She's pretty far gone, this time, I'm afraid." 

Phyllis rendered to her acquaintance's misfortune 
the tribute of a conventional murmur. 

"Oh, let's go and look at where they be burying 
Jimmy Priagle!" she suddenly whispered, in an awe- 
struck, excited tone. 

"What!" cried Luke, "you don't mean to say he's 
dead, — the old man?" 

"Where's 't been to, then, these last days?" she 
enquired. "He died yesterday morning and they 
be going to bury him on Monday. 'Twill be a mon- 
strous large funeral. Can't be but you've heard tell 
of Jimmy's being done for." She added, in an amazed 
and bewildered tone. 

"I've been very busy this last week," said Luke. 

"You didn't seem very busy this afternoon, when 



514 WOOD AND STONE 

you were with Annie and me up at station-field," 
she exclaimed, with a mischievous little laugh. Then 
in a changed voice, "Let's go and see where they're 
going to put him. It's somewhere over there, under 
South Wall." 

They moved cautiously hand in hand between the 
dark grassy mounds, the heavy dew soaking their 
shoes. 

Suddenly Phyllis stopped, her fingers tightening, 
and a delicious thrill of excitement quivering through 
her. "There it is. Look!" she whispered. 

They advanced a step or two, and found them- 
selves confronted by a gloomy oblong hole, and an 
ugly heap of ejected earth. 

"Oh, how awful it do look, doesn't it, Luke darling?" 
she murmured, clinging closely to him. 

He put his arm round the girl's waist, and together, 
under the vast dome of the starlit sky, the two 
warm-blooded youthful creatures contemplated the 
resting-place of the generations. 

"Its queer to think," remarked Luke pensively, 
"that just as we stand looking on this, so, when 
we're dead, other people will stand over our graves, 
and we know nothing and care nothing!" 

"They dug this out this morning," said Phyllis, 
more concerned with the immediate drama than with 
general meditations of mortality. "Old Ben Fursling's 
son did it, and my father helped him in his dinner- 
hour. They said another hot day like this would 
make the earth too hard." 

Luke moved forward, stepping cautiously over the 
dark upturned soil. He paused at the extreme edge 
of the gaping recess. 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 515 

"What'll you give me," he remarked turning to 
his companion, "if I climb down into it?" 

"Don't talk like that, Luke," protested the girl. 
" 'Tisn't lucky to say them things. I wouldn't give 
you nothing. I'd run straight away and leave 

you." 

The young man knelt down at the edge of the 
hole, and with the elegant cane he had carried in his 
hand all that afternoon, fumbled profanely in its 
dusky depths. Suddenly, to the girl's absolute horror, 
he scrambled round, and deliberately let himself 
down into the pit. She breathed a sigh of unutter- 
able relief, when she observed his head and shoulders 
still above the level of the ground. 

"It's all right," he whispered, "they've left it 
half-finished. I suppose they'll do the rest on 
Monday." 

"Please get out of it, Luke," the girl pleaded. 
"I don't like to see you there. It make me think 
you're standing on Jimmy Pringle." 

Luke obeyed her and emerged from the earth 
almost as rapidly as he had descended. 

When he was once more by her side, Phyllis gave 
a little half-deliberate shudder of exquisite terror. 
"Fancy," she whispered, clinging tightly to him, "if 
you was to drag me to that hole, and put me down 
there! I think I should die of fright." 

This conscious playing with her own girlish fears 
was a very interesting characteristic in Phyllis 
Santon. Luke had recognized something of the sort 
in her before, and now he wondered vaguely, as he 
glanced from the obscurity of Nevilton Churchyard 
to the brilliant galaxy of luminous splendour surround- 



516 WOOD AND STONE 

ing the constellation Pegasus, whether she really 
wanted him to take her at her word. 

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of 
voices at the inn-door. They both held their breath, 
listening intently. 

"There's father!" murmured the girl. "He must 
have come back from Lintot's and be trying to get 
into the public again! Come and help me over the 
wall, Luke darling. Only don't let anybody see us." 

As they hurried across the enclosure, Phyllis whis- 
pered in his ears a remark that seemed to him either 
curiously irrelevant, or inspired in an occult manner 
by psychic telepathy. She had lately refrained from 
any reference to Lacrima. The Italian's friendliness 
to her under the Hullaway elms had made her reti- 
cent upon this subject. On this occasion, however, 
though quite ignorant of James' presence in the 
churchyard, she suddenly felt compelled to say to 
Luke, in an intensely serious voice: 

"If some of you clever ones don't stop that mar- 
riage of Master Goring, there'll be some more holes 
dug in this place! There be some things what them 
above never will allow." 

He helped her over the wall, and watched her over- 
take her staggering parent, who had already reeled 
some distance down the road. Then he returned to 
his brother and roused him from his sleep. James 
was sulky and irritable at being so brusquely restored 
to consciousness, but the temperature of his mind 
appeared as normal and natural as ever. 

They quitted the place without further conversa- 
tion, and strode off in silence up the village street. 
The perpendicular slabs of the crowded head stones, 



PLANETARY INTERVENTION 517 

and the yet more numerous mounds that had neither 
name nor memory, resumed their taciturn and lonely 
watch. 

To no human eyes could be made visible the poor 
thin shade that was once Jimmy Pringle, as it swept, 
bat-like, backwards and forwards, across the dew- 
drenched grass. But the shade itself, endowed with 
more perception than had been permitted to it while 
imprisoned in the "muddy vesture" of our flesh 
and blood, became aware, in its troubled flight, of 
a singular spiritual occurrence. 

Rising from the base of that skull-crowned monu- 
ment, two strange and mournful phantoms flitted 
waveringly, like huge ghost-moths, along the pro- 
truding edge of the church-roof. Two desolate and 
querulous voices, like the voices of conflicting winds 
through the reeds of some forlorn salt-marsh, quivered 
across the listening fields. 

"It is strong and unconquered — the great heart 
of my Hill," one voice wailed out. "It draws them. 
It drives them. The earth is with it; the planets are 
for it, and all their enchantments cannot prevail 
against it!" 

"The leaves may fall and the trees decay," moaned 
the second voice, "but where the sap has once 
flowed, Love must triumph." 

The fluttering shadow of Jimmy Pringle fled in 
terror from these strange sounds, and took refuge 
among the owls in the great sycamore of the Priory 
meadow. A falling meteorite swept downwards from 
the upper spaces of the sky and lost itself behind 
the Wild Pine ridge. 

"Strength and cunning," the first voice wailed 



518 WOOD AND STONE 

forth again, "alone possess their heart's desire. All 
else is vain and empty." 

"Love and Sacrifice," retorted the other, "outlast 
all victories. Beyond the circle of life they rule the 
darkness, and death is dust beneath their feet." 

Crouched on a branch of his protecting sycamore, 
the thin wraith of Jimmy Pringle trembled and shook 
like an aspen-leaf. A dumb surprise possessed the 
poor transmuted thing to find itself even less assured 
of palpable and familiar salvation, than when, after 
drinking cider at the Boar's Head in Athelston, he 
had dreamed dreams at Captain Whiffley's gate. 

"The Sun is lord and god of the earth," wailed 
the first voice once more. "The Sun alone is master 
in the end. Lust and Power go forth with him, and 
all flesh obeys his command." 

"The Moon draws more than the tides," answered 
the second voice. "In the places of silence where 
Love waits, only the Moon can pass; and only the 
Moon can hear the voice of the watchers." 

From the red planet, high up against the church- 
tower, to the silver planet low down among the 
shadowy trees, the starlit spaces listened mutely to 
these antiphonal invocations. Only the distant ex- 
panse of the Milky Way, too remote in its translunar 
gulfs to heed these planetary conflicts, shimmered 
haughtily down upon the Wood and Stone of Nevil- 
ton — impassive, indifferent, unconcerned. 



CHAPTER XX 
VOX POPULI 

JAMES ANDERSEN'S mental state did not fall 
away from the restored equilibrium into which 
the unexpected intervention of Ninsy Lintot had 
magnetized and medicined him. He went about his 
work as usual, gloomier and more taciturn, perhaps, 
than before, but otherwise with no deviation from 
his normal condition. 

Luke noticed that he avoided all mention of Lac- 
rima, and, as far as the younger brother knew, made 
no effort to see her. Luke himself received, two 
days after the incident in the Methodist cemetery, a 
somewhat enigmatic letter from Mr. Taxater. This 
letter bore a London post-mark and informed the 
stone-carver that after a careful consideration of 
the whole matter, and an interview with Lacrima, the 
writer had come to the conclusion that no good pur- 
pose would be served by carrying their plan into exe- 
cution. Mr. Taxater had, accordingly, so the missive 
declared, destroyed the incriminating document which 
he had induced Luke to sign, and had relinquished 
all thought of an interview with Mr. Dangelis. 

The letter concluded by congratulating Luke on his 
brother's recovery — of which, it appeared, the diplo- 
matist had been informed by the omniscient Mrs. 
Watnot — and assuring him that if ever, in any way, 
he, the writer, could be of service to either of the 



520 WOOD AND STONE 

two brothers, they could count on his unfailing re- 
gard. An obscure post-script, added in pencil in a 
very minute and delicate hand, indicated that the 
interview with Lacrima, referred to above, had con- 
firmed the theologian in a suspicion that hitherto 
he had scrupulously concealed, namely, that their 
concern with regard to the Italian's position was less 
called for than appearances had led them to sup- 
pose. 

After reading and weighing this last intimation, 
before he tore up the letter into small fragments, 
the cynical Luke came to the conclusion that the 
devoted champion of the papacy had found out that 
his co-religionist had fallen from grace; in other words, 
that Lacrima Traffio was no longer a Catholic. It 
could hardly be expected, the astute youth argued, 
that Mr. Taxater should throw himself into a diffi- 
cult and troublesome intrigue in order that an apos- 
tate from the inviolable Faith, once for all delivered 
to the Saints, should escape what might reasonably 
be regarded as a punishment for her apostacy. 

The theologian's post-script appeared to hint that 
the girl was not, after all, so very unwilling, in this 
matter of her approaching marriage. Luke, in so far 
as he gave such an aspect of the affair any particular 
thought, discounted this plausible suggestion as a 
mere conscience-quieting salve, introduced by the 
writer to smooth over the true cause of his reaction. 

For his own part it had been always of James and 
not of Lacrima he had thought, and since James had 
now been restored to his normal state, the question 
of the Italian's moods and feelings affected him very 
little. He was still prepared to discuss with his 



VOX POPULI 521 



brother any new chance of intervention that might 
offer itself at the last moment. He desired James' 
peace of mind before everything else, but in his 
heart of hearts he had considerable doubt whether 
the mood of self-effacing magnanimity which had 
led his brother to contemplate Lacrima's elopement 
with Mr. Quincunx, would long survive the return 
of his more normal temper. Were he in James' 
position, he told himself grimly, he should have much 
preferred that the girl should marry a man she hated 
rather than one she loved, as in such a case the field 
would be left more open for any future "rapproche- 
ment." 

Thus it came about that the luckless Pariah, by 
the simple accident of her inability to hold fast to 
her religion, lost at the critical moment in her life 
the support of the one friendly power, that seemed 
capable, in that confusion of opposed forces, of bring- 
ing to her aid temporal as well as spiritual, pressure. 
She was indeed a prisoner by the waters of Babylon, 
but her forgetfulness of Sion had cut her off from the 
assistance of the armies of the Lord. 

The days passed on rapidly now, over the heads of 
the various persons involved in our narrative. For 
James and Lacrima, and in a measure for Mr. Quin- 
cunx, too, — since it must be confessed that the 
shock of Ninsy's collapse had not resulted in any 
permanent tightening of the recluse's moral fibre, — 
they passed with that treacherous and oblivious 
smoothness which dangerous waters are only too 
apt to wear, when on the very verge of the cataract. 

In the stir and excitement of the great political 
struggle which now swept furiously from one end of 



522 WOOD AND STONE 

the country to the other, the personal fortunes of a 
group of tragically involved individuals, in a small 
Somersetshire village, seemed to lose, for all except 
those most immediately concerned, every sort of 
emphasis and interest. 

The polling day at last arrived, and a considerable 
proportion of the inhabitants of Nevilton, both men 
and women, found themselves, as the end of the 
fatal hours approached, wedged and hustled, in a 
state of distressing and exhausted suspense, in the 
densely crowded High Street in front of the Yeo- 
borough Town Hall. 

Mr. Clavering himself was there, and in no very 
amiable temper. Perverse destiny had caused him 
to be helplessly surrounded by a noisy high-spirited 
crew of Yeoborough factory-girls, to whom the event 
in progress was chiefly interesting, in so far as it 
afforded them an opportunity to indulge in uproarious 
chaff and to throw insulting or amorous challenges 
to various dandified youths of their acquaintance, 
whom they caught sight of in the confusion. Mr. 
Clavering's ill-temper reached its climax when he 
became aware that a good deal of the fre<> and indis- 
creet badinage of his companions was addressed to 
none other than his troublesome parishioner, Luke 
Andersen, whose curly head, surmounted by an 
aggressively new straw hat, made itself visible not 
far off. 

The mood of the vicar of Nevilton during the last 
few weeks had been one of accumulative annoyance. 
Everything had gone wrong with him, and it was 
only by an immense effort of his will that he had 
succeeded in getting through his ordinary pastoral 



VOX POPULI 523 



labour, without betraying the unsettled state of his 
mind and soul. 

He could not, do what he might, get Gladys out 
of his thoughts for one single hour of the day. She 
had been especially soft and caressing, of late, in 
her manner towards him. More submissive than of 
old to his spiritual admonitions, she had dropped her 
light and teasing ways, and had assumed, in her 
recent lessons with him, an air of pliable wistfulness, 
composed of long, timidly interrupted glances from 
her languid blue eyes, and little low-voiced murmurs 
of assent from her sweetly-parted lips. 

It was in vain that the poor priest struggled against 
this obsession. The girl was as merciless as she was 
subtie in the devices she employed to make sure of 
her hold upon him. She would lead him on, by hesi- 
tating and innocent questions, to expound some diffi- 
cult matter of faith; and then, just as he was launched 
out upon a high, pure stream of mystical interpreta- 
tion, she would bring his thoughts back to herself 
and her deadly beauty, by some irresistible feminine 
trick, which reduced all his noble speculations to so 
much empty air. 

Ever since that night when he had trembled so 
helplessly under the touch of her soft fingers beneath 
the cedars of the South Drive, she had sought oppor- 
tunities for evoking similar situations. She would 
prolong the clasp of her hand when they bade one 
another good night, knowing well how this apparently 
natural and unconscious act would recur in throbs 
of adder's poison through the priest's veins, long after 
the sun had set behind St. Catharine's tower. 

She loved sometimes to tantalize and trouble him 



524 WOOD AND STONE 

by relating incidents which brought herself and her 
American fiance into close association in his mind. 
She would wistfully confide to him, for example, 
how sometimes she grew weary of love-making, 
begging him to tell her whether, after all, she were 
wise in risking the adventure of marriage. 

By these arts, and others that it were tedious to 
enumerate, the girl gradually reduced the unfortunate 
clergyman to a condition of abject slavery. The 
worst of it was that, though his release from her 
constant presence was rapidly approaching — with the 
near date of the ceremonies for which he was pre- 
paring her — instead of being able to rejoice in this, 
he found himself dreading it with every nerve of his 
harassed senses. 

Clavering had felt himself compelled, on more than 
one occasion, to allude to the project of Lacrima's 
marriage, but his knowledge of the Italian's character 
was so slight that Gladys had little difficulty in mak- 
ing him believe, or at least persuade himself he 
believed, that no undue pressure was being put upon 
her. 

It was of Lacrima that he suddenly found himself 
thinking as, hustled and squeezed between two 
obstreperous factory-girls, he watched the serene 
and self-possessed Luke enjoying with detached 
amusement the vivid confusion round him. The 
fantastic idea came into his head, that in some sort 
of way Luke was responsible for those sinister ru- 
mours regarding the Italian's position in Nevilton, 
which had thrust themselves upon his ears as he 
moved to and fro among the villagers. 

He had learnt of the elder Andersen's recovery from 



VOX POPULI 525 

Mrs. Fringe, but even that wise lady had not been 
able to associate this event with the serious illness 
of Ninsy Lintot, to whose bed-side the young clergy- 
man had been summoned more than once during the 
last week. 

Clavering felt an impulse of unmitigated hatred 
for the equable stone-carver as he watched him bandy- 
ing jests with this or the other person in the crowd, 
and yet so obviously holding himself apart from it 
all, and regarding the whole scene as if it only existed 
for his amusement. 

A sudden rush of some extreme partisans of the 
popular cause, making a furious attempt to over- 
power the persistent taunts of a group of young 
farmers who stood above them on a raised portion 
of the pavement, drove a wedge of struggling hu- 
manity into the midst of the crowd who surrounded 
the irritable priest. Clavering was pushed, in spite 
of his efforts to extricate himself, nearer and nearer 
to his detested rival, and at last, in the most gro- 
tesque and annoying manner possible, he found him- 
self driven point-blank into the stone-carver's very 
arms. Luke smiled, with what seemed to the heated 
and flustered priest the last limit of deliberate im- 
pertinence. 

But there was no help for it. Clavering was 
forced to accept his proferred hand, and return, with 
a measure of courtesy, his nonchalant greeting. 
Squeezed close together — for the crowd had concen- 
trated itself now into an immoveable mass — the for- 
tunate and the unfortunate lover of Gladys Romer 
listened, side by side, to the deafening shouts, which, 
first from one party and then from the other, heralded 



526 WOOD AND STONE 

the appearance of the opposing candidates upon the 
balcony above. 

"I really hardly know," said Luke, in a loud whis- 
per, "which side you are on. I suppose on the Con- 
servative? These radicals are all Nonconformists, 
and only waiting for a chance of pulling the Church 
down." 

"Thank you," retorted the priest raising his voice 
so as to contend against the hubbub about them. 
"I happen to be a radical myself. My own hope is 
that the Church will be pulled down. The Church 
I believe in cannot be touched. Its foundations are 
too deep." 

"Three cheers for Romer and the Empire!" roared 
a voice behind them. 

"Wone and the People! Wone and the working- 
man!" vociferated another. 

"You'll be holding your confirmation soon, I 
understand," murmured Luke in his companion's ear, 
as a swaying movement in the crowd squeezed them 
even more closely together. 

Hugh Clavering realized for the first time in his 
life what murderers feel the second before they strike 
their blow. He could have willingly planted his 
heel at that moment upon the stone-carver's face. 
Surely the man was intentionally provoking him. He 
must know — he could not help knowing — the agi- 
tation in his nerves. 

"Romer and Order! Romer and Sound Finance!" 
roared one portion of the mob. 

"Wone and Liberty! Wone and Justice!" yelled 
the opposing section. 

"I love a scene like this," whispered Luke. 



VOX POPULI 527 

"Doesn't it make you beautifully aware of the con- 
temptible littleness of the human race?" 

"I am not only a radical," retorted Clavering, 
"but I happen also to be a human being, and one who 
can't take so airy a view of an occasion of this kind. 
The enthusiasm of these people doesn't at all amuse 
me. I sympathize with it." 

The stone-carver was not abashed by this rebuke. 
"A matter of taste," he said, "a matter of taste." 
Then, freeing his arm which had got uncomfortably 
wedged against his side, and pushing back his hat, 
"I love to associate these outbursts of popular feel- 
ing with the movements of the planets. Tonight, 
you know, one ought to be able to see — " 

Clavering could no longer contain himself. "Damn 
your planets!" he cried, in a tone so loud, that an 
old lady in their neighbourhood ejaculated, "Hush! 
hush!" and looked round indignantly. 

"I beg your pardon," muttered the priest, a little 
ashamed. "What I mean is, I am most seriously 
concerned about this contest. I pray devoutly Wone 
will win. It'll be a genuine triumph for the working 
classes if he does." 

"Romer and the Empire!" interpolated the thun- 
derous voice behind them. 

"I don't care much for the man himself," he went 
on, "but this thing goes beyond personalities." 

"I'm all for Romer myself," said Luke. "I have 
the best of reasons for being grateful to him, though 
he is my employer." 

"What do you mean? What reasons?" cried 
Clavering sharply, once more beginning to feel the 
most unchristian hatred for this urbane youth. 



528 WOOD AND STONE 

"Oh, I'm sure I needn't tell you that, sir," responded 
Luke; "I'm sure you know well enough how much I 
admire our Nevilton beauty." 

Gladys' unhappy lover choked with rage. He had 
never in his life loathed anything so much as he 
loathed the way Luke's yellow curls grew on his 
forehead. His fingers clutched convulsively the palms 
of his hands. He would like to have seized that 
crop of hair and beaten the man's head against the 
pavement. 

"I think it's abominable," he cried, "this forcing 
of Miss Traflfio to marry Goring. For a very little, 
I'd write to the bishop about it and refuse to marry 
them." 

The causes that led to this unexpected and irrele- 
vant outburst were of profound subtlety. Clavering 
forgot, in his desire to make his rival responsible for 
every tragedy in the place, that he had himself 
resolved to discount, as mere village gossip, all the 
dark rumours he had heard. The blind anger which 
plunged him into this particular outcry, sprang, in 
reality, from the bitterness of his own conscience- 
stricken misgivings. 

"I don't think you will," remarked Luke, lowering 
his voice to a whisper, though the uproar about them 
rendered such a precaution quite unnecessary. "It 
is not as a rule a good thing to interfere in these 
matters. Miss Gladys has told me herself that the 
whole thing is an invention of Romer's enemies, 
probably of this fellow Wone." 

"She's told me the same story," burst out the 
priest, "but how am I to believe her?" 

A person unacquainted with the labyrinthine con- 



VOX POPULI 529 

volutions of the human mind would have been stag- 
gered at hearing the infatuated slave thus betray 
his suspicion of his enchantress, and to his own 
rival; but the man's long- troubled conscience, driven 
by blind anger, rendered him almost beside him- 
self. 

"To tell you the truth," said Luke, "I think 
neither you nor I have anything to do with this 
affair. You might as well agitate yourself about 
Miss Romer's marriage with Dangelis! Girls must 
manage these little problems for themselves. After 
all, it doesn't really matter much, one way or the 
other. What they want, is to be married. The 
person they choose is quite a secondary thing. We 
have to learn to regard all these little incidents as 
of but small importance, my good sir, as our world 
sweeps round the sun!" 

"The sun — the sun!" cried Clavering, with dif- 
ficulty restraining himself. "What has the sun to 
do with it? You are too fond of bringing in your 
suns and your planets, Andersen. This trick of 
yours of shelving the difficulties of life, by pretending 
you're somehow superior to them all, is a habit I 
advise you to give up! It's cheap. It's vulgar. 
It grows tiresome after a time." 

Luke's only reply to this was a sweet smile; and 
the two were wedged so closely together that the 
priest was compelled to notice the abnormal white- 
ness and regularity of the young man's teeth. 

"I confess to you," continued Luke, with an air 
of unruffled detachment, as if they had been dis- 
cussing the tint of a flower or the marks upon a 
butterfly's wing, "I have often wondered what the 



530 WOOD AND STONE 

relations really are between Mr. Romer and Miss 
Traffio; but that is the sort of question which, as 
Sir Thomas Browne would say, lends itself to a 
wide solution." 

"Romer and Prosperity!" "Wone and Justice!'* 
yelled the opposing factions. 

"Our pretty Gladys' dear parent," continued the 
incorrigible youth, completely disregarding the fact 
that his companion, speechless with indignation, was 
desperately endeavouring to extricate himself from 
the press, ' seems born under a particularly lucky star. 
I notice that every attempt which people make to 
thwart him comes to nothing. That's what I admire 
about him: he seems to move forward to his end 
like an inexorable fate." 

"Rubbish!" ejaculated the priest, turning his 
angry face once more towards his provoking rival. 
"Fiddlesticks and rubbish! The man is a man, like 
the rest of us. I only pray Heaven he's going to 
lose this election!" 

"Under a lucky star," reiterated the stone-carver. 
"I wish I knew," he added pensively, "what his star 
is. Probably Jupiter!" 

"Wone and Liberty!" "Wone and the Rights of 
the People!" roared the crowd. 

"Wone and God's Vengeance!" answered, in an 
indescribably bitter tone, a new and different voice. 
Luke pressed his companion's arm. 

"Did you hear that?" he whispered eagerly. 
"That's Philip. Who would have thought he'd have 
been here? He's an anarchist, you know." 

Clavering, who was taller than his companion, 
caught sight of the candidate's son. Philip's coun- 



VOX POPULI 531 

tenance was livid with excitement, and his arms were 
raised as if actually invoking the Heavens. 

"Silly fool! muttered Luke. "He talks of God as 
glibly as any of his father's idiotic friends. But 
perhaps he was mocking! I thought I detected a 
tang of irony in his tone." 

"Most of you unbelievers cry upon God when the 
real crisis comes," remarked the priest. "But I like 
Philip Wone. I respect him. He, at least, takes his 
convictions seriously." 

"I believe you fancy in your heart that some 
miracle is going to be worked, to punish my worthy 
employer," observed Luke. "But I assure you, 
you're mistaken. In this world the only way our 
Mr. Romers are brought low is by being out-matched 
on their own ground. He has a lucky star; but other 
people" — this was added in a low, significant tone — 
"other people may possibly have stars still more 
lucky." 

At this moment the cheering and shouting became 
deafening. Some new and important event had evi- 
dently occurred. Both men turned and glanced up 
at the stucco-fronted edifice that served Yeoborough 
as a city-hall. The balcony had become so crowded 
that it was difficult to distinguish individual figures; 
but there was a general movement there, and people 
were talking and gesticulating eagerly. Presently all 
these excited persons fell simultaneously into silence, 
and an attitude of intense expectation. The crowd 
below caught the thrill of their expectancy, and with 
upturned faces and eager eyes, waited the event. 
There was a most formidable hush over the whole 
sea of human heads; and even the detached Luke 



532 WOOD AND STONE 

felt his heart beating in tune to the general ten- 
sion. 

In the midst of this impressive silence the burly 
figure of the sheriff of the parliamentary district 
made his way slowly to the front of the balcony. 
With him came the two candidates, each accompan- 
ied by a lady, and grouped themselves on either side 
of him. The sheriff standing erect, with a sheet of 
paper in his hand, saluted the assembled people, and 
proceeded to announce, in simple stentorian words, 
the result of the poll. 

Clavering had been stricken dumb with amazement 
to observe that the lady by Mr. Romer's side was 
not Mrs. Romer, as he had thoughtlessly assumed it 
would be, but Gladys herself, exquisitely dressed, and 
looking, in her high spirits and excitement, more 
lovely than he had ever seen her. 

Her fair hair, drawn back from her head beneath a 
shady Gainsborough hat, shone like gold in the sun- 
shine. Her cheeks were flushed, and their delicate 
rose-bloom threw into beautiful relief the pallor of 
her brow and neck. Her tall girlish figure looked 
soft and arresting amid the black-coated politicians 
who surrounded her. Her eyes were brilliant. 

Contrasted with this splendid apparition at Mr. 
Romer's side, the faded primness of the good spouse 
of the Christian Candidate seemed pathetic and gro- 
tesque. Mrs. Wone, in her stiff black dress and 
old-fashioned hat, looked as though she were attend- 
ing a funeral. Nor was the appearance of her hus- 
band much more impressive or imposing. 

Mr. Romer, with his beautiful daughter's hand 
upon his arm, looked as noble a specimen of sage 



VOX POPULI 533 

authority and massive triumph, as any of that as- 
sembled crowd were likely to see in a life-time. A 
spasmodic burst of cheering was interrupted by 
vigorous hisses and cries of "Hush! hush! Let the 
gentleman speak!" 

Lifting his hand with an appropriate air of grave 
solemnity, the sheriff proceeded to read: "Result of 
the Election in this Parliamentary Division — Mr. 
George Wone, seven thousand one hundred and fifty 
nine! Mr. Mortimer Romer, nine thousand eight 
hundred and sixty -one! I therefore declare Mr. 
Mortimer Romer duly elected." 

A burst of incredible cheering followed this procla- 
mation, in the midst of which the groans and hisses 
of the defeated section were completely drowned. 
The cheering was so tremendous and the noisy re- 
action after the hours of expectancy so immense, that 
it was difficult to catch a word of what either the 
successful or the unsuccessful candidate said, as 
they made their accustomed valedictory speeches. 

Clavering and Luke were swept far apart from 
one another in the mad confusion; and it was well 
for them both, perhaps, that they were; for before 
the speeches were over, or the persons on the balcony 
had disappeared into the building, a very strange 
and disconcerting event took place. 

The unfortunate young Philip, who had received 
the announcement of his father's defeat as a man 
might receive a death-sentence, burst into a piercing 
and resounding cry, which was clearly audible, not 
only to those immediately about him, but to every 
one of the ladies and gentlemen assembled on the 
balcony. There is no need to repeat in this place 



534 WOOD AND STONE 

the words which the unhappy young man hurled at 
Mr. Romer and his daughter. Suffice it to say that 
they were astounding in their brutality and grossness. 

As soon as he had uttered them, Philip sank down 
upon the ground, in the miserable convulsions of 
some species of epileptic fit. The tragic anxiety of 
poor Mrs. Wone, who had not only heard his words, 
but seen his collapse, broke up the balcony party in 
disorder. 

Such is human nature, that though not one of the 
aristocratic personages there assembled, believed for 
a moment that Philip was anything but a madman; 
still, the mere weight of such ominous words, though 
flung at random and by one out of his senses, had 
an appreciable effect upon them. It was noticed 
that one after another they drew away from the 
two persons thus challenged; and this, combined 
with the movement about the agitated Mrs. Wone, 
soon left the father and daughter, the girl clinging to 
her parent's arm, completely isolated. 

Before he led Gladys away, however, Mr. Romer 
turned a calm and apparently unruffled face upon the 
scene below. Luke, who, it may be well believed, 
had missed nothing of the subtler aspects of the 
situation, was so moved by the man's imperturbable 
serenity that he caught himself on the point of 
raising an admiring and congratulatory shout. He 
stopped himself in time, however; and in place of 
acclaiming the father, did all he could to catch the 
eye of the daughter. 

In this he was unsuccessful; for the attention of 
Gladys, during the brief moment in which she fol- 
lowed Mr. Romer's glance over the heads of the 



VOX POPULI 535 

people, was fixed upon the group of persons who 
surrounded the prostrate Philip. Among these persons 
Luke now recognized, and doubtless the girl had 
recognized too, the figure of the vicar of Nevilton. 

Luke apostrophized his rival with an ejaculation 
of mild contempt. "A good man, that poor priest," 
he muttered, "but a most unmitigated fool! As to 
Romer, I commend him! But I think I've put a 
spoke in the wheel of his good fortune, all the same, 
in spite of the planet Jupiter!" 



CHAPTER XXI 

CAESAR'S QUARRY 

MR. ROMER'S victory in the election was 
attended by a complete lull in the political 
world of Nevilton. Nothing but an un- 
avoidable and drastic crisis, among the ruling circles 
of the country, could have precipitated this for- 
midable struggle in the middle of the holiday- time; 
and as soon as the contest was over, the general re- 
laxation of the season made itself doubly felt. 

This lull in the political arena seemed to extend 
itself into the sphere of private and individual 
emotion, in so far as the persons of our drama were 
concerned. The triumphant quarry-owner rested 
from his labors under the pleasant warmth of the 
drowsy August skies; and as, in the old Homeric 
Olympus, a relapse into lethargy of the wielder 
of thunder-bolts was attended by a cessation of 
earthly strife, so in the Nevilton world, the ele- 
ments of discord and opposition fell, during this 
siesta of the master of Leo's Hill, into a state of 
quiescent inertia. 

But though the gods might sleep, and the people 
might relax and play, the watchful unwearied fates 
spun on, steadily and in silence, their ineluctable 
threads. 

The long process of "carrying the corn" was over 
at last, and night by night the magic-burdened 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 537 

moon grew larger and redder above the misty stubble- 
fields. 

The time drew near for the reception of the suc- 
cessful candidate's daughter into the historic church 
of the country over which he was now one of the 
accredited rulers. A few more drowsy sunshine- 
drugged days remained to pass, and the baptism 
of Gladys — followed, a week later, by the formal 
imposition of episcopal hands — would be the signal 
for the departure of August and the beginning of 
the fall of the leaves. 

The end of the second week in September had been 
selected for the double marriage, partly because it 
synchronized with the annual parish feast-day, and 
partly because it supplied Ralph Dangelis with an 
excuse for carrying off his bride incontinently to New 
York by one of his favourite boats. 

Under the quiet surface of this steadily flowing 
flood of destiny, which seemed, just then, to be 
casting a drowning narcotic spell upon all concerned, 
certain deep and terrible misgivings troubled not a 
few hearts. 

It may be frequently noticed by those whose in- 
terest it is to watch the strange occult harmonies be- 
tween the smallest human dramas and their elemental 
accomplices, that at these peculiar seasons when 
Nature seems to pause and draw in her breath, men 
and women find it hard to use or assert their normal 
powers of resistance. The planetary influences seem 
nearer earth than usual ; — nearer, with the apparent 
nearness of the full tide-drawing moon and the 
heavy scorching sun; — and for those more sensitive 
souls, whose nerves are easily played upon, there 



538 WOOD AND STONE 

is produced a certain curious sense of lying back 
upon fate, with arms helplessly outspread, and wills 
benumbed and passive. 

But though some such condition as this had 
narcotized all overt resistance to the destiny in store 
for her in the heart of Lacrima, it cannot be said 
that the Italian's mind was free from an appalling 
shadow. Whether by reason of a remote spark 
of humanity in him, or out of subtle fear lest by any 
false move he should lose his prey, or because of 
some diplomatic and sagacious advice received from 
his brother-in-law, Mr. John Goring had, so far, con- 
ducted himself extremely wisely towards his pros- 
pective wife, leaving her entirely untroubled by any 
molestations, and never even seeing her except in the 
presence of other people. How far this unwonted 
restraint was agreeable to the nature of the farmer, 
was a secret concealed from all, except perhaps from 
his idiot protege, the only human being in Nevilton 
to whom the unattractive man ever confided his 
thoughts. 

Lacrima had one small and incidental consolation 
in feeling that she had been instrumental in sending 
to a home for the feeble-minded, the unfortunate 
child of the gamekeeper of Auber Lake. In this 
single particular, Gladys had behaved exceptionally 
well, and the news that came of the girl's steady 
progress in the direction of sanity and happiness 
afforded some fitful gleam of light in the obscurity 
that surrounded the Pariah's soul. 

The nature of this intermittent gleam, its deep 
mysterious strength drawn from spiritual sources, 
helped to throw a certain sad and pallid twilight 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 539 

over her ordained sacrifice. This also she felt was 
undertaken, like her visit to Auber Lake, for the sake 
of an imprisoned and fettered spirit. If by means of 
such self-immolation her friend of Dead Man's Lane 
would be liberated from his servitude and set per- 
manently upon his feet, her submission would not 
be in vain. 

She had come once more to feel as though the im- 
pending event were, as far as she was concerned, a 
sort of final death-sentence. The passing fantasy, 
that in a momentary distortion of her mind had 
swept over her of the new life it might mean to have 
children of her own, even though born of this un- 
natural union, had not approached again the troubled 
margin of her spirit. 

Even the idea of escaping the Romers was only 
vaguely present. She would escape more than the 
Romers; she would escape the whole miserable coil of 
this wretched existence, if the death she anticipated 
fell upon her; for death, and nothing less than 
death, seemed the inevitable circumference of the 
iron circle that was narrowing in upon her. 

Had those two strange phantoms that we have 
seen hovering over Nevilton churchyard, representing 
in their opposite ways the spiritual powers of the 
place, been able to survey — as who could deny they 
might be able? — the fatal stream which was now 
bearing the Pariah forward to the precipice, they 
would have been, in their divers tempers, struck 
with delight and consternation at the spectacle pre- 
sented to them. There was more in this spectacle, 
it must be admitted, to bring joy into the heart of 
a goblin than into that of an angel. Coincidence, 



540 WOOD AND STONE 

casualty, destiny — all seemed working together to 
effect the unfortunate girl's destruction. 

The fact that, by the recovery of his brother, the 
astute Luke Andersen, the only one of all the Nevil- 
ton circle capable of striking an effective blow in 
her defence, had been deprived of all but a very 
shadowy interest in what befell, seemed an especially 
sinister accident. Equally unfortunate was the luck- 
less chance that at this critical movement had led 
the diplomatic Mr. Taxater to see fit to prolong his 
stay in London. Mr. Quincunx was characteristically 
helpless. James Andersen seemed, since the recovery 
of his normal mind, to have subsided like a person 
under some restraining vow. Lacrima was a little 
surprised that he made no attempt to see her or to 
communicate with her. She could only suppose she 
had indelibly hurt him, by her rejection of his quixotic 
offers, on their way back from Hullaway. 

Thus to any ordinary glance, cast upon the field 
of events as they were now arranging themselves, it 
would have looked as though the Italian's escape from 
the fate hanging over her were as improbable as it 
would be for a miracle to intervene to save her. 

In spite of the wild threat flung out by Mr. Claver- 
ing in his sudden anger as he waited with Luke in the 
Yeoborough street, the vicar of Nevilton made no 
attempt to interfere. Whether he really managed to 
persuade his conscience that all was well, or whether 
he came to the conclusion that without some initiative 
from the Italian it would be useless to meddle, not 
the most subtle psychologist could say. The fact 
remained that the only step he took in the matter 
was to assure himself that the girl's nominal Catholi- 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 541 

cism had so far lapsed into indifference, that she was 
likely to raise no objection to a ceremony according 
to Anglican ritual. 

The whole pitiful situation, indeed, offered only 
one more terrible and branding indictment, against 
the supine passivity of average human nature in the 
presence of unspeakable wrongs. The power and 
authority of the domestic system, according to which 
the real battle-field of wills takes place out of sight of 
the public eye, renders it possible for this inertia of 
the ordinary human crowd to cloak itself under a 
moral dread of scandal, and under the fear of any 
drastic breach of the uniformity of social usage. 

A visitor from Mars or Saturn might have sup- 
posed, that in circumstances of this kind, every 
decent-thinking person in the village would have 
rushed headlong to the episcopal throne, and called 
loudly for spiritual mandates to stop the outrage. 
Where was the delegated Power of God — so the for- 
lorn shadows of the long-evicted Cistercians might 
be imagined crying — whose absolute authority could 
be appealed to in face of every worldly force? What 
was the tender-souled St. Catharine doing, in her 
Paradisiac rest, that she could remain so passively in- 
different to such monstrous and sacrilegious use of 
her sacred building? Was it that such transactions 
as this, should be carried through, under its very 
shelter, that the gentle spirits who guarded the Holy 
Rood had made of Nevilton Mount their sacred 
resting-place? Must the whole fair tradition of the 
spot remain dull, dormant, dumb, while the devotees 
of tyranny worked their arbitrary will — "and nothing 
said"? 



542 WOOD AND STONE 

Such imaginary appeals, so fantastic in the utter- 
ance, were indeed, as that large August-moon rose 
night by night upon the stubble-fields, far too re- 
mote from Nevilton's common routine to enter the 
heads of any of that simple flock. The morning 
mists that diffused themselves, like filmy dream- 
figures, over the watchful promontory of Leo's Hill, 
were as capable as any of these villagers of crying aloud 
that wrong was being done. 

The loneliness in the midst of which Lacrima 
moved on her way — groping, as her enemy had 
taunted her with doing, so helplessly with her wistful 
hands — was a loneliness so absolute that it some- 
times seemed to her as if she were already literally 
dead and buried. Now and then, with a pallid 
phosphorescent glimmer like the gleam of a corpse- 
light, the mortal dissolution of all the ties that 
bound her to earthly interests, itself threw a fitful 
illumination over her consciousness. 

But Mr. Romer had over-reached himself in his 
main purpose. The moral disintegration which he 
looked for, and which the cynical apathy of Mr. 
Quincunx encouraged, had, by extending itself to 
every nerve of her spirit, rounded itself off, as it 
were, full circle, and left her in a mental state rather 
beyond both good and evil, than delivered up to the 
latter as opposed to the former. The infernal power 
might be said to have triumphed; but it could 
scarcely be said to have triumphed over a living 
soul. It had rather driven her soul far off, far away 
from all these contests, into some mysterious 
translunar region, where all these distinctions lapsed 
and merged. 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 543 

Leo's Hill itself had never crouched in more taci- 
turn intentness than it did under that sweltering 
August sunshine, which seemed to desire, in the 
gradual scorching of the green slopes, to reduce even 
the outward skin of the monster to an approximate 
conformity with its tawny entrails. 

Mr. Taxater's departure from the scene at this 
juncture was not only, little as she knew it, a loss of 
support to Lacrima, it was also a very serious blow to 
Vennie Seldom. 

The priest in Yeoborough, who at her repeated 
request had already begun to give her surreptitious 
lessons in the Faith, was not in any sense fitted to 
be a young neophyte's spiritual adviser. He was 
fat. He was gross. He was lethargic. He was in- 
different. He also absolutely refused to receive her 
into the Church without her mother's sanction. This 
refusal was especially troublesome to Vennie. She 
knew enough of her mother to know that while it 
was her nature to resist blindly and obstinately any 
deviation from her will, when once a revolt was an 
established fact she would resign herself to it with a 
surprising equanimity. To ask Valentia for per- 
mission to be received into the Church would mean 
a most violent and distressing scene. To announce 
to her that she had been so received, would mean 
nothing but melancholy and weary acquiesence. 

She felt deeply hurt at Mr. Taxater's desertion of 
her at this moment of all moments. It was incred- 
ible that it was really necessary for him to be so 
long in town. As a rule he never left the Gables 
during the month of August. His conduct puzzled 
and troubled her. Did he care nothing whether she 



544 WOOD AND STONE 

became a Catholic or not? Were his lessons mere 
casual by-play, to fill up his spare hours in an in- 
teresting and pleasant diversion? Was he really the 
faithful friend he called himself? Not only had he 
absented himself, but he had done so without sending 
her a single word. 

As a matter of fact it was extremely rare for Mr. 
Taxater to write a letter, even to his nearest friends, 
except under the stress of theological controversy. 
But Vennie knew nothing of this. She simply felt 
hurt and injured; as though the one human being, 
upon whom she had reposed her trust, had deserted 
and betrayed her. He had spoken so tenderly, so 
affectionately to her, too, during their last walk to- 
gether, before the unfortunate encounter with James 
Andersen in the Athelston porch! 

It is true that his attitude over that matter of 
Andersen's insanity, and also in the affair of Lacrima's 
marriage, had a little shocked and disconcerted her. 
He had bluntly refused to take her into his confidence, 
and she felt instinctively that the conversation with 
Luke, from which she had been so curtly dismissed, 
was of a kind that would have hurt and surprised her. 

It seemed unworthy of him to absent himself from 
Nevilton, just at the moment when, as she felt certain 
in her heart, some grievous outrage was being com- 
mitted. She had learned quickly enough of Andersen's 
recovery; but nothing she could learn either lessened 
her terrible apprehension about Lacrima, or gave her 
the least hint of a path she could follow to do any- 
thing on the Italian's behalf. 

She made a struggle once to see the girl and to 
talk to her. But she came away from the hurried 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 545 

interview as perplexed and troubled in her mind as 
ever. Lacrima had maintained an obstinate and im- 
penetrable reserve. Vennie made up her mind that she 
would postpone for the present her own religious 
revolt, and devote herself to keeping a close and care- 
ful watch upon events in Nevilton. 

Mr. Clavering's present attitude rendered her pro- 
foundly unhappy. The pathetic overtures she had 
made to him recently, with a desperate hope of re- 
newing their friendship on a basis that would be 
unaffected even by her change of creed, had seemed 
entirely unremarked by the absorbed clergyman. 
She could not help brooding sometimes, with a feeling 
of wretched humiliation, over the brusqueness and 
rudeness which characterized his manner towards her. 

She recalled, more often than the priest would 
have cared to have known, that pursuit of theirs, of 
the demented Andersen, and how in his annoyance 
and confusion he had behaved to her in a fashion 
not only rough but positively unkind. 

It was clear that he was growing more and more 
slavishly infatuated with Gladys; and Vennie could 
only pray that the days might pass quickly and the 
grotesque blasphemy of the confirmation service be 
carried through and done with, so that the evil spell 
of her presence should be lifted and broken. 

Prayer indeed — poor little forlorn saint ! — was all 
that was left to her, outside her mother's exacting 
affection, and she made a constant and desperate use 
of it. Only the little painted wooden image, in her 
white-washed room, a pathetic reproduction of the 
famous Nuremburg Madonna, could have betrayed 
how long were the hours in which she gave herself 



546 WOOD AND STONE 

up to these passionate appeals. She prayed for 
Clavering in that shy heart-breaking manner — never 
whispering his name, even to the ears of Our Lady, 
but always calling him "He" and "Him" — in which 
girls are inclined to pray for the man to whom they 
have sacrificed their peace. She prayed desperately 
for Lacrima, that at the last moment, contrary to all 
hope, some intervention might arrive. 

Thus it came about, that beneath the roofs of 
Nevilton — for neither James Andersen nor Mr. 
Quincunx were "praying men" — only one voice 
was lifted up, the voice of the last of the old race 
of the place's rulers, to protest against the flowing 
forward to its fatal end, of this evil tide. 

Nevertheless, things moved steadily and irresistibly 
on; and it seemed as though it were as improbable 
that those shimmering mists which every evening 
crept up the sides of Leo's Hill should endure the 
heat of the August noons, as that the prayers of this 
frail child should change the course of ordained 
destiny. 

If none but her little painted Madonna knew how 
passionate were Vennie's spiritual struggles; not even 
that other Vennie, of the long-buried royal court, 
whose mournful nun's eyes looked out upon the great 
entrance-hall, knew what turbulent thoughts and 
anxieties possessed the soul of Gladys Romer. 

Was Mr. Taxater right in the formidable hint he 
had given the young stone-carver, as to the result 
of his amour with his employer's daughter? Was 
Gladys not only the actual mistress of Luke, but the 
prospective mother of a child of their strange love? 

Whatever were the fair-haired girl's thoughts and 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 547 

apprehensions, she kept them rigidly to herself; and 
not even Lacrima, in her wildest imagination, ever 
dreamed that things had gone as far as that. If it 
had chanced to be, as Mr. Taxater supposed, and 
as Luke seemed willing to admit, Gladys was ap- 
parently relying upon some vague accident in the 
course of events, or upon some hidden scheme of her 
own, to escape the exposure which the truth of such 
a supposition seemed to render inevitable. 

The fact remained that she let matters drift on, 
and continued to prepare — in her own fashion — 
not only for her reception into the Church of England, 
but for her marriage to the wealthy American. 

Dangelis was continually engaged now in running 
backwards and forwards to town on business connected 
with his marriage; and with a view to making these 
trips more pleasantly and conveniently he had ac- 
quired a smart touring-car of his own, which he soon 
found himself able to drive without assistance. The 
pleasure of these excursions, leading him, in delicious 
solitude, through so many unvisited country places 
and along such historic roads, had for the moment 
distracted his attention from his art. 

He rarely took Gladys with him; partly because he 
regarded himself as still but a learner in the science 
of driving, but more because he felt, at this critical 
moment of his life, an extraordinary desire to be alone 
with his own thoughts. Most of these thoughts, it is 
true, were such as it would not have hurt the feelings 
of his fiancee to have surprised in their passage 
through his mind; but not quite all of them. Ever 
since the incident of Auber Lake, an incident which 
threw the character of his betrothed into no very 



548 WOOD AND STONE 

charming light, Dangelis had had his moments of 
uneasiness and misgiving. He could not altogether 
conceal from himself that his attraction to Gladys 
was rather of a physical than of a spiritual, or even 
of a psychic nature. 

Once or twice, while the noble expanses of Salis- 
bury Plain or the New Forest thrilled him with a 
pure dilation of soul, as he swept along in the clear 
air, he was on the verge of turning his car straight 
to the harbour of Southampton and taking the first 
boat that offered itself, bound East, West, North or 
South — it mattered nothing the direction ! — so that 
an impassable gulf of free sea-water should separate 
him forever from the hot fields and woods of Nevilton. 

Once, when reaching a cross-road point, where the 
name of the famous harbour stared at him from a 
sign-post, he had even gone so far as to deviate to 
the extent of several miles from his normal road. 
But that intolerable craving for the girl's soft-clinging 
arms and supple body, with which she had at last 
succeeded in poisoning the freedom of his mind, drew 
him back with the force of a magnet. 

The day at length approached, when, on the 
festival of his favorite saint, Mr. Clavering was to 
perform the ceremony, to which he had looked for- 
ward so long and with such varied feelings. It was 
Saturday, and on the following morning, in a service 
especially arranged to take place privately, between 
early celebration and ordinary matins, Gladys was 
to be baptized. 

Dangelis had suddenly declared his intention of 
making his escape from a proceeding which to his 
American mind seemed entirely uncalled for, and to 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 549 

his pagan humour seemed not a little grotesque. He 
had decided to start, immediately after breakfast, 
and motor to London, this time by way of Trow- 
bridge and Westbury. 

The confirmation ceremony, for reasons connected 
with the convenience of the Lord Bishop, had been 
finally fixed for the ensuing Wednesday, so that only 
two days were destined to elapse between the girl's 
reception into the Church, and her admission to its 
most sacred rites. Dangelis was sufficiently a heathen 
to desire to be absent from this event also, though 
he had promised Mr. Clavering to support his be- 
trothed on the occasion of her first Communion on 
the following Sunday, which would be their last 
Sunday together as unwedded lovers. 

On this occasion, Gladys persuaded him to let her 
ride by his side a few miles along the Yeoborough 
road. They had just reached the bridge across the 
railway-line, about a mile and a half from the village, 
when they caught sight of Mr. John Goring, returning 
from an early visit to the local market. 

Gladys made the artist stop the car, and she got 
out to speak to her uncle. After a minute or two's 
conversation, she informed Dangelis that she would 
return with Mr. Goring by the field-path, which left 
the road at that point and followed the track of the 
railway. The American, obedient to her wish, set 
his car in motion, and waving her a gay good-bye, dis- 
appeared swiftly round an adjacent corner. 

Gladys and her uncle proceeded to walk slowly 
homeward, across the meadows; neither of them, 
however, paying much attention to the charm of the 
way. In vain from the marshy hollows between their 



550 WOOD AND STONE 

path and the metal track, certain brilliant clumps of 
ragged robin and red rattle signalled to them to 
pause and admire. Gladys and Mr. Goring strolled 
forward, past these allurements, with a superb ab- 
sorption in their own interests. 

"I can't think, uncle," Gladys was saying, "how 
it is that you can go on in the way you're doing; 
you, a properly engaged person, and not seeing any- 
thing of your young lady?" 

The farmer laughed. "Ah! my dear, but what 
matter? I shall see her soon enough; all I want to, 
may-be." 

"But most engaged people like to see a little of 
one another before they're married, don't they, 
uncle? I know Ralph would be quite mad if he 
couldn't see me." 

"But, my pretty, this is quite a different case. 
When Bert and I" — he spoke of the idiot as if 
they had been comrades, instead of master and 
servant — "have bought a new load of lop-ears, we 
never tease 'em or fret 'em before we get 'em home." 

"But Lacrima isn't a rabbit!" cried Gladys im- 
patiently; "she's a girl like me, and wants what all 
girls want, to be petted and spoilt a little before 
she's plunged into marriage." 

"She didn't strike me as wanting anything of that 
kind, when I made up to her in our parlour," replied 
Mr. Goring. 

"Oh you dear old stupid!" cried his niece, "can't 
you understand that's what we're all like? We all 
put on airs, and have fancies, and look cross; but 
we want to be petted all the same. We want it all 
the more!" 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 551 

"I reckon I'd better leave well alone all the same, 
just at present," observed the farmer. "If I was to 
go stroking her and making up to her, while she's 
on the road, may-be when we got her into the hutch 
she'd bite like a weasel." 

"She'd never really bite!" retorted his companion. 
"You don't know her as well as I do. I tell you, 
uncle, she's got no more spirit than a tame pigeon." 

"I'm not so sure of that," said the farmer. 

Gladys flicked the grass impatiently with the end 
of her parasol. 

"You may take my word for it, uncle," she con- 
tinued. "The whole thing's put on. It's all affec- 
tation and nonsense. Do you think she'd have agreed 
to marry you if she wasn't ready for a little fun? 
Of course she's ready! She's only waiting for you to 
begin. It makes it more exciting for her, when she 
cries out and looks injured. That's the only reason 
why she does it. Lots of girls are like that, you 
know!" 

"Are they, my pretty, are they? 'Tis difficult to 
tell that kind, may-be, from the other kind. But 
I'm not a man for too much of these fancy ways." 

"You're not drawing back, uncle, are you?" cried 
Gladys, in considerable alarm. 

"God darn me, no!" replied the farmer. "I'm 
going to carry this business through. Don't you fuss 
yourself. Only I like doing these things in my own 
way — dost understand me, my dear? — in my own 
way; and then, if so be they go wrong, I can't put 
the blame on no one else." 

"I wonder you aren't more keen, uncle," began 
Gladys insinuatingly, following another track, "to 



55% WOOD AND STONE 

see more of a pretty girl you're just going to marry. 
I don't believe you half know how pretty she is! 
I wish you could see her doing her hair in the 
morning." 

"I shall see her, soon enough, my lass; don't 
worry," replied the farmer. 

"I should so love to see you give her one kiss," 
murmured Gladys. "Of course, she'd struggle and 
make a fuss, but she'd really be enjoying it all the 
time." 

"May-be she would, my pretty, and may-be she 
wouldn't. I'm not one that likes hearing either 
rabbits or maidens start the squealing game. It fair 
gives me the shivers. Bert, he can stand it, but I 
never could. It's nature, I suppose. A man can't 
change his nature no more than a cow nor a horse." 

"I can't understand you, uncle," observed Gladys. 
"If I were in your place, I'm sure I shouldn't be 
satisfied without at least kissing the girl I was going 
to marry. I'd find some way of getting round her, 
however sulky she was. Oh, I'm sure you don't half 
know how nice Lacrima is to kiss!" 

"I suppose she isn't so mighty different, come to 
that," replied the farmer, "than any other maid. I 
don't mind if I give you a kiss, my beauty!" he 
added, encircling his nrece with an affectionate em- 
brace and kissing her flushed cheek. "There — there! 
Best let well alone, sweetheart, and leave your old 
uncle to manage his own little affairs according to 
his own fashion!" 

But Gladys was not so easily put off. She had 
recourse to her fertile imagination. 

"You should have heard what she said to me the 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 553 

other night, uncle. You know the way girls talk? 
or you ought to, anyhow! She said she hoped you'd 
go on being the same simple fool, after you were 
married. She said she'd find it mighty easy to twist 
you round her finger. 'Why,' she said, 'I can do 
what I like with him now. He treats me as if I 
were a high-born lady and he were a mere common 
man. I believe he's downright afraid of me ! ' That's 
the sort of things she says about you, uncle. She 
thinks in her heart that you're just a fool, a simple 
frightened fool!" 

"Darn her! she does, does she?" cried Mr. Goring, 
touched at last by the serpent's tongue. "She thinks 
I'm a fool, does she? Well! Let her have her laugh. 
Them laughs best as laughs last, in my thinking!" 

"Yes, she thinks you're a great big silly fool, uncle. 
Of course its all pretence, her talk about wanting 
you to be like that; but that's what she thinks you 
are. What she'd really like — only she doesn't say 
so, even to me — would be for you to catch her 
suddenly round the waist and kiss her on the mouth, 
and laugh at her pretendings. I expect she's waiting 
to give you a chance to do something of that sort; 
only you don't come near her. Oh, she must think 
you're a monstrous fool! She must chuckle to herself 
to think what a fool you are." 

"I'll teach her what kind of a fool I am," muttered 
Mr. Goring, "when I've got her to myself, up at the 
farm. This business of dangling after a maid's 
apron strings, this kissing and cuddling, don't suit 
somehow with my nature. I'm not one of your 
fancy-courting ones and never was!" 

"Listen, uncle!" said Gladys eagerly, laying her 



554 WOOD AND STONE 

hand on his arm. "Suppose I was to take her up 
to Caesar's Quarry this afternoon? That would be a 
lovely chance! You could come strolling round about 
four o'clock. I'd be on the watch; and before she 
knew you were there, I'd scramble out, and you 
could climb down. She couldn't get away from you, 
and you'd have quite a nice little bit of love- 
making." 

Mr. Goring paused, and prodded the ground with 
the end of his stick. 

"What a little devil you are!" he exclaimed. 
"Darn me if this here job isn't a queer business! 
Here are you, putting yourself out and fussing 
around, only for a fellow to have what's due to him. 
You leave us alone, sweetheart, my young lady and 
me! I reckon we know what's best for ourselves, 
without you thrusting your hand in." 

"But you might just walk up that way, uncle; it 
isn't far over the hill. I'd give — oh, I don't know 
what ! — to see you two together. She wants to be 
teased a little, you know! She's getting too proud 
and self-satisfied for anything. It would do her ever 
so much good to be taught a lesson. It isn't much 
to do, is it? Just to give the girl you're going to 
marry one little kiss?" 

"But how do I know you two wenches aren't 
fooling me, even now?" protested the cautious 
farmer. "'Tis just the sort of maids' trick ye might 
set out to play upon a man. How do I know ye 
haven't put your two darned little heads together 
over this job?" 

Gladys looked round. They were approaching the 
Mill Copse. 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 555 

"Please, uncle," she cried, "don't say such things 
to me. You know I wouldn't join with anyone 
against you. Least of all with her! Just do as I 
tell you, and stroll up to Caesar's Quarry about four 
o'clock. I promise you faithfully I haven't said a 
word to her about it. Please, uncle, be nice and 
kind over this." 

She threw her arms round Mr. Goring's neck. 
"You haven't done anything for me for a long time," 
she murmured in her most persuasive tone. "Do 
you remember how I used to give you butterfly- 
kisses when I was a little girl, and you kept apples 
for me in the big loft? 

Mr. Goring's nature may, or may not have been, 
as he described it; it is certain that the caresses and 
cajoleries of his lovely niece had an instantaneous 
effect upon him. His slow-witted suspicions melted 
completely under the spell of her touch. 

"Well, my pretty," he said, as they moved on, 
under the shadowy trees of the park, "may-be, if 
I've nothing else to do and things seem quiet, I'll 
take a bit of a walk this afternoon. But you mustn't 
count on it. If I do catch sight of 'ee, 'round 
Caesar's way, I'll let 'ee know. But 'tisn't a down- 
right promise, mind!" 

Gladys clapped her hands. "You're a perfect love, 
uncle!" she cried jubilantly. "I wish I were La- 
crima; I'd be ever, ever so nice to you!" 

"Ye can be nice to me, as 'tis, sweetheart," re- 
plied the farmer. "You and me have always been 
kind of fond of each other, haven't us? But I reckon 
ye'd best be slipping off now, up to your house. I 
never care greatly for meeting your father by acci- 



556 WOOD AND STONE 

dent-like. He's one of these sly ones that always 
makes a fellow feel squeamy and leery." 

That afternoon it happened that the adventurous 
Luke had planned a trip down to Weymouth, with a 
new flame of his, a certain Polly Shadow, whose 
parents kept a tobacco-shop in Yeoborough. 

He had endeavoured to persuade his brother to 
accompany them on this little excursion, in the hope 
that a breath of sea-air might distract and refresh 
him; but James had expressed his intention of pay- 
ing a visit to his gentle restorer, up at Wild Pine, 
who was now sufficiently recovered to enable her to 
sit out in the shade of the great trees. 

The church clock had just struck three, when James 
Andersen approached the entrance to Nevil's Gully. 

He had not advanced far into the shadow of the 
beeches, when he heard the sound of voices. He 
paused, and listened. The clear tones of Ninsy 
Lintot were unmistakeable, and he thought he de- 
tected — though of this he was not sure — the 
nervous high-pitched voice of Philip Wone. From the 
direction of the sounds, he gathered that the two 
young people were seated somewhere on the bracken- 
covered slope above the barton, where, as he well 
knew, there were several shady terraces overlooking 
the valley. 

Unwilling to plunge suddenly into a conversation 
that appeared, as far as he could catch its purport, 
to be of considerable emotional tension, Andersen 
cautiously ascended the moss-grown bank on his 
left, and continued his climb, until he had reached 
the crest of the hill. He then followed, as silently as 
he could, the little grassy path between the stubble- 



CAESARS QUARRY 557 

field and the thickets, until he came to the open 
space immediately above these fern-covered terraces. 

Yes, his conjecture had been right. Seated side 
by side beneath the tall-waving bracken, the auburn- 
haired Ninsy and her anarchist friend were engaged 
in an absorbing and passionate discussion. Both of 
them were bare-headed, and the young man's hand 
rested upon the motionless fingers of his companion, 
which were clasped demurely upon her lap. Philip's 
voice was raised in intense and pitiful supplication. 

"I'd care for you day and night," Andersen heard 
him cry. "I'd nurse you when you were ill, and 
keep you from every kind of annoyance." 

"But, Philip dear," the girl's voice answered, "you 
know what the doctor said. He said I mustn't marry 
on any account. So even if I had nothing against it, 
it wouldn't be possible for us to do this." 

"Ninsy, Ninsy!" cried the youth pathetically, 
"don't you understand what I mean? I can't bear 
having to say these things, but you force me to, 
when you talk like that. The doctor meant that it 
would be wrong for you to have children, and he took 
if for granted that you'd never find anyone ready 
to live with you as I'd live with you. It would only 
be a marriage in name. I mean it would only be a 
marriage in name in regard to children. It would be 
a real marriage to me, it would be heaven to me, to 
live side by side with you, and no one able any more 
to come between us! I can't realize such happiness. 
It makes me feel dizzy even to think of it!" 

Ninsy unclasped her hands, and gently repulsing 
him, remained buried in deep thought. Standing erect 
above them, like a sentry upon a palisade, James 



558 WOOD AND STONE 

Andersen stared gloomily down upon this little drama. 
In some strange way, — perhaps because of some 
sudden recurrence of his mental trouble, — he seemed 
quite unconscious of anything dishonourable or base 
in thus withholding from these two people the knowl- 
edge that he was overhearing them. 

"I'll take care of you to the end of my life!" the 
young man repeated. "I'm doing quite well now 
with my work. You'll be able to have all you want. 
You'll be better off than you are here, and you know 
perfectly well that as soon as your father's free 
he'll marry that friend of his in Yeoborough. I 
saw him with her last Sunday. I'm sure its only for 
your sake that he stays single. She's got three 
children, and that's what holds him back — that, 
and the thought that you two mightn't get on to- 
gether. You'd be doing your father a kindness if you 
said yes to me, Ninsy. Please, please, my darling, 
say it, and make me grateful to you forever!" 

"I can't say it, — Philip, dear, I can't, I can't"; 
murmured the girl, in a voice so low that the sentinel 
above them could only just catch her words. "I do 
care for you, and I do value your goodness to me, 
but I can't say the words, Philip. Something seems 
to stop me, something in my throat." 

It was not to her throat however, that the agi- 
tated Ninsy raised her thin hands. As she pressed 
them against her breast a look of tragic sorrow came 
into her face. Philip regarded her wistfully. 

"You're thinking you don't love me, dear, — and 
never can love me. I know that, well enough! I 
know you don't love me as I love you. But what 
does that matter? I've known that, all the time. 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 559 

The thing is, you won't find anyone who loves you as 
I do, — ready to live with you as I've said I will, 
ready to nurse you and look after you. Other people's 
love will be always asking and demanding from you. 
Mine — oh, it's true, my darling, it's true! — mine 
only wants to give up everything to make you 
happy." 

Ninsy was evidently more than a little moved by 
the boy's appeal. There was a ring of passionate 
sincerity in his tone which went straight to her 
heart. She bent down and covered her face with her 
hands. When at length she lifted up her head and 
answered him, there were tears on her cheeks, and 
the watchful listener above them did not miss the 
quiver in her tone. 

"I'm sorry, Philip boy, more sorry than I can 
say, that I can't be nicer to you, that I can't show 
my gratitude to you, in the way you wish. But 
though I do care for you, and — and value your 
dear love — something stops me, something makes 
it impossible that this should happen." 

"I believe it's because you love that fellow Ander- 
sen!" cried the excited youth, leaping to his feet in 
his agitation. 

In making this movement, the figure of the stone- 
carver, silhouetted with terrible distinctness against 
the sky-line, became visible to him. Instinctively he 
uttered a cry of surprise and anger. 

"What do you want here? You've been listening! 
You've been spying on us! Get away, can't you! 
Get back to your pretty young lady — her that's 
going to marry John Goring for the sake of his 
money! Clear out of this, do you hear? Ninsy's 



560 WOOD AND STONE 

sick of you and your ways. Clear off! or I'll make you 
— eavesdropper ! ' ' 

By this time Ninsy had also risen, and stood facing 
the figure above them. Every vestige of colour had 
left her cheeks, and her hand was pressed against her 
side. Andersen made a curious incoherent sound and 
took a step towards them. 

"Get away, can't you!" reiterated the furious 
youth. "You've caused enough trouble here already. 
Look at her, — can't you see how ill she is? Get 
back — damn you! — unless you want to kill her." 

Ninsy certainly looked as though in another mo- 
ment she were going to fall. She made a piteous 
little gesture, as if to ward off from Andersen the 
boy's savage words, but Philip caught her passion- 
ately round the waist. 

"Get away!" he cried once more. She belongs to 
me now. You might have had her, you coward — 
you turncoat ! — but you let her go for your newer 
prey. Oh, you're a fine gentleman, James Andersen, 
a fine faithful gentleman! You don't hold with 
strikes. You don't hold with workmen rising against 
masters. You hold with keeping in with those that 
are in power. Clear off — eavesdropper! Get back 
to Mistress John Goring and your nice brother! 
He's as pretty a gentleman as you are, with his dear 
Miss Gladys!" 

Ninsy's feet staggered beneath her and she began 
to hang limp upon his arm. She opened her mouth 
to speak, but could only gasp helplessly. Her wide- 
open eyes — staring from her pallid face — never left 
Andersen for a moment. Of Philip she seemed abso- 
lutely unconscious. The stone-carver made another 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 561 

step down the hill. His eyes, too, were fixed intently 
on the girl, and of his rival's angry speeches he seemed 
utterly oblivious. 

"Get away!" the boy reiterated, beside himself 
with fury, supporting the drooping form of his com- 
panion as if its weight were nothing. "We've had 
enough of your shilly-shallying and trickery! We've 
had enough of your fine manners! A damned cow- 
ardly spy — that's what I call you, you well-behaved 
gentleman! Get back — can't you!" 

The drooping girl uttered some incoherent words 
and made a helpless gesture with her hand. Andersen 
seemed to read her meaning in her eyes, for he paused 
abruptly in his approach and stretched out his arms. 

"Good-bye, Ninsy!" he murmured in a low voice. 
He said no more, and turning on his heel, scrambled 
swiftly back over the crest of the ridge and disap- 
peared from view. 

Philip flung a parting taunt after him, and then, 
lifting the girl bodily off her feet, staggered down 
the slope to the cottage, holding her in his arms. 

Meanwhile James Andersen walked swiftly across 
the stubble-field in the direction of Leo's Hill. At 
the pace he moved it only took him some brief 
minutes to reach the long stone wall that separates, 
in this quarter, the quarried levels of the promontory 
from the high arable lands which abut upon it. 

He climbed over this barrier and strode blindly 
and recklessly forward among the slippery grassy 
paths that crossed one another along the edges of 
the deeper pits. 

The stone-carver was approaching, though quite 
unconsciously, the scene of a very remarkable drama. 



562 WOOD AND STONE 

Some fifteen minutes before his approach, the two 
girls from Nevilton House had reached the precipi- 
tous edge of what was known in that locality as 
Caesar's Quarry. Caesar's Quarry was a large disused 
pit, deeper and more extensive than most of the old 
excavations on the Hill, and surrounded, on all but 
one side, by blank precipitous walls of weather- 
stained sandstone. These walls of smooth stone 
remained always dark and damp, whatever the tem- 
perature might be of the air above them; and the 
floor of the Quarry was composed of a soft verdant 
carpet of cool moist moss, interspersed by stray 
heaps of discoloured rubble, on which flourished, at 
this particular season of the year, masses of that 
sombre-foliaged weed known as wormwood. 

On the northern side of Caesar's Quarry rose a high 
narrow ridge of rock, divided, at uneven spaces, by 
deeply cut fissures or chasms, some broad and some 
narrow, but all overgrown to the very edge by short 
slippery grass. This ridge, known locally as Claudy's 
Leap, was a favourite venture-place of the more 
daring among the children of the neighbourhood, who 
would challenge one another to feats of courage and 
agility, along its perilous edge. 

On the side of Claudy's Leap, opposite from Caesar's 
Quarry, was a second pit, of even deeper descent than 
the other, but of much smaller expanse. This second 
quarry, also disused for several generations, remained 
so far nameless, destiny having, it might seem, with- 
held the baptismal honour, until the place had earned 
a right to it by becoming the scene of some tragic, 
or otherwise noteworthy, event. 

Gladys and Lacrima approached Caesar's Quarry 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 563 

from the western side, from whose slope a little 
winding path — the only entrance or exit attainable 
— led down into its shadowy depths. The Italian 
glanced with a certain degree of apprehension into 
the gulf beneath her, but Gladys seemed to take the 
thing so much for granted, and appeared so perfectly 
at her ease, that she was ashamed to confess her 
tremors. The elder girl, indeed, continued chatting 
cheerfully to her companion about indifferent matters, 
and as she clambered down the little path in front 
of her, she turned once or twice, in her fluent dis- 
course, to make sure that Lacrima was following. 
The two cousins stood for awhile in silence, side by 
side, when they reached the bottom. 

"How nice and cool it is!" cried Gladys, after a 
pause. "I was getting scorched up there! Let's sit 
down a little, shall we, — before we start back? I 
love these old quarries." 

They sat down, accordingly, upon a heap of stones, 
and Gladys serenely continued her chatter, glancing 
up, however, now and again, to the frowning ridges 
of the precipices above them. 

They had not waited long in this way, when the 
quarry-owner's daughter gave a perceptible start, and 
raised her hand quickly to her lips. 

Her observant eye had caught sight of the figure 
of Mr. John Goring peering down upon them from 
the opposite ridge. Had Lacrima observed this 
movement and lifted her eyes too, she would have 
received a most invaluable warning, but the Powers 
whoever they may have been, who governed the 
sequence of events upon Leo's Hill, impelled her to 
keep her head lowered, and her interest concentrated 



564 WOOD AND STONE 

upon a tuft of curiously feathered moss. Gladys 
remained motionless for several moments, while the 
figure on the opposite side vanished as suddenly as it 
had appeared. Then she slowly rose. 

"Oh, how silly I am," she cried; "I've dropped that 
bunch of marjoram. Stop a minute, dear. Don't 
move! I'll just run up and get it. It was in the 
path. I know exactly where!" 

"I'll come with you if you like," said Lacrima 
listlessly, "then you won't have to come back. Or 
why not leave it for a moment?" 

"It's on the path, I tell you!" cried her cousin, 
already some way up the slope; "I'm scared of some- 
one taking it. Marjoram isn't common about here. 
Oh no! Stay where you are. I'll be back in a 
second. " 

The Italian relapsed into her former dreamy un- 
concern. She listlessly began stripping the leaves 
from a spray of wormwood which grew by her side. 
The place where she sat was in deep shadow, though 
upon the summit of the opposite ridge the sun lay hot. 
Her thoughts hovered about her friend in Dead Man's 
Lane. She had vaguely hoped to get a glimpse of 
him this afternoon, but the absence of Dangelis had 
interfered with this. 

She began building fantastic castles in the air, 
trying to call up the image of a rejuvenated Mr. 
Quincunx, freed from all cares and worries, living the 
placid epicurean life his heart craved. Would he, 
she wondered, recognize then, what her sacrifice 
meant? Or would he remain still obsessed by this 
or the other cynical fantasy, as far from the real 
truth of things as a madman's dream? She smiled 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 5Q5 

gently to herself as she thought of her friend's 
peculiarities. Her love for him, as she felt it now, 
across a quivering gulf of misty space, was a thing 
as humorously tolerant and tender as it might have 
been had they been man and wife of many years' 
standing. In these things Lacrima's Latin blood gave 
her a certain maturity of feeling, and emphasized 
the maternal element in her attachment. 

She contemplated dreamily the smooth bare walls 
of the cavernous arena in which she sat. Their 
coolness and dampness was not unpleasant after the 
heat of the upper air, but there was something 
sepulchral about them, something that gave the girl 
the queer impression of a colossal tomb — a tomb 
whose scattered bones might even now be lying, 
washed by centuries of rain, under the rank weeds of 
these heaps of rubble. 

She heard the sound of someone descending the 
path behind her but, taking for granted that it was 
her cousin, she did not turn her head. It was only 
when the steps were quite close that she recognized 
that they were too heavy to be those of a girl. 

Then she leapt to her feet, and swung round, — to 
find herself confronted by the sturdy figure of Mr. 
John Goring. She gave a wild cry of panic and fled 
blindly across the smooth floor of the great quarry. 
Mr. Goring followed her at his leisure. 

The girl's terror was so great, that, hardly conscious 
of what she did, she ran desperately towards the re- 
motest corner of the excavation, where some ancient 
blasting-process had torn a narrow crevice out of 
the solid rock. This direction of her flight made the 
farmer's pursuit of her a fatally easy undertaking, 



566 WOOD AND STONE 

for the great smooth walls closed in, at a sharp angle, 
at that point, and the crevice, where the two walls 
met, only sank a few feet into the rock. 

Mr. Goring, observing the complete hopelessness 
of the girl's mad attempt to escape him, proceeded 
to advance towards her as calmly and leisurely as if 
she had been some hare or rabbit he had just shot. 
The fact that Lacrima had chosen this particular 
cul-de-sac, on the eastern side of the quarry, was a 
most felicitous accident for Gladys, for it enabled 
her to watch the event with as much ease as if she 
had been a Drusilla or a Livia, seated in the Roman 
amphitheatre. The fair-haired girl crept to the 
extreme brink of the steep descent and there, lying 
prone on the thyme-scented grass, her chin propped 
upon her hands, she followed with absorbed interest 
the farmer's movements as he approached his recalci- 
trant fiancee. 

The terrified girl soon found out the treachery of 
the panic-instinct which had led her into this trap. 
Had she remained in the open, it is quite possible 
that by a little manoeuvring she could have escaped; 
but now her only exit was blocked by her advancing 
pursuer. 

Turning to face him, and leaning back against the 
massive wall of stone, she stretched out her arms on 
either side of her, seizing convulsively in her fingers 
some tufts of knot-grass which grew on the surface 
of the rock. Here, with panting bosom and pallid 
cheeks, she awaited his approach. Her tense figure 
and terror-stricken gaze only needed the imprisoning 
fetters to have made of her an exact modern image 
of the unfortunate Andromeda. She neither moved 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 567 

nor uttered the least cry, as Mr. Goring drew near 
her. 

At that moment a wild and unearthly shout rever- 
berated through the quarry. The sound of it — ■ caught 
up by repeated echoes — went rolling away across 
Leo's Hill, frightening the sheep and startling the cider- 
drinkers in the lonely Inn. Gladys leapt to her feet, 
ran round to where the path descended, and began 
hastily scrambling down. Mr. Goring retreated hur- 
riedly into the centre of the arena, and with his hand 
shading his eyes gazed up at the intruder. 

It was no light-footed Perseus, who on behalf of this 
forlorn child of classic shores, appeared as if from the 
sky. It was, indeed, only the excited figure of James 
Andersen that Mr. Goring's gaze, and Lacrima's 
bewildered glance, encountered simultaneously. The 
stone-carver seemed to be possessed by a legion of 
devils. His first thundering shout was followed by 
several others, each more terrifying than the last, 
and Gladys, rushing past the astonished farmer, 
seized Lacrima by the arm. 

"Come!" she cried. "Uncle was a brute to frighten 
you. But, for heaven's sake, let's get out of this, 
before that madman collects a crowd! They'll all 
be down here from the inn in another moment. 
Quick, dear, quick ! Our only chance is to get away 
now." 

Lacrima permitted her cousin to hurry her across 
the quarry and up the path. As they neared the 
summit of the slope the Italian turned and looked 
back. Mr. Goring was still standing where they had 
left him, gazing with petrified interest at the wild 
gestures of the man above him. 



568 WOOD AND STONE 

Andersen seemed beside himself. He kept fran- 
tically waving his arms, and seemed engaged in some 
incoherent defiance of the invisible Powers of the 
air. Lacrima, as she looked at him, became convinced 
that he was out of his mind. She could not even 
be quite clear if he recognized her. She was certain 
that it was not against her assailant that his wild 
cries and defiances were hurled. It did not appear 
that he was even aware of the presence of the farmer. 
Whether or not he had seen her and known her when 
he uttered his first cry, she could not tell. It 
was certainly against no earthly enemies that the 
man was struggling now. 

Vennie Seldom might have hazarded the supersti- 
tious suggestion that his fit was not madness at all 
but a sudden illumination, vouchsafed to his long 
silence, of the real conditions of the airy warfare that 
is being constantly waged around us. At that mo- 
ment, Vennie might have said, James Andersen was 
the only perfectly sane person among them, for to his 
eyes alone, the real nature of that heathen place and 
its dark hosts was laid manifestly bare. The man, 
according to this strange view, was wrestling to the 
death, in his supreme hour, against the Forces that 
had not only darkened his own days and those of 
Lacrima, but had made the end of his mother's life 
so tragic and miserable. 

Gladys dragged Lacrima away as soon as they 
reached the top of the ascent but the Pariah had 
time to mark the last desperate gesture of her de- 
liverer before he vanished from her sight over the 
ridge. 

Mr. Goring overtook them before they had gone 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 569 

far, and walked on with them, talking to Gladys 
about Andersen's evident insanity. 

"It's no good my trying to do anything," he re- 
marked. "But I'll send Bert round for Luke as soon 
as I get home. Luke'll bring him to his senses. They 
say he's been taken like this before, and has come 
round. He hears voices, you know, and fancies 
things." 

They walked in silence along the high upland road 
that leads from the principal quarries of the Hill to 
the Wild Pine hamlet and Nevil's Gully. When they 
reached the latter place, the two girls went on, down 
Root-Thatch Lane, and Mr. Goring took the field- 
path to the Priory. 

Before they separated, the farmer turned to his 
future bride, who had been careful to keep Gladys 
between herself and him, and addressed her in the 
most gentle voice he knew how to assume. 

"Don't be angry with me, lass," he said. "I was 
only teasing, just now. 'Twas a poor jest maybe, 
and ye've cause to look glowering. But when we 
two be man and wife ye'll find I'm a sight better 
to live with than many a fair-spoken one. These 
be queer times, and like enough I seem a queer fel- 
low, but things'll settle themselves. You take my 
word for it!" 

Lacrima could only murmur a faint assent in reply 
to these words, but as she entered with Gladys the 
shadow of the tunnel-like lane, she could not help 
thinking that her repulsion to this man, dreadful 
though it' was, was nothing in comparison with the 
fear and loathing with which she regarded Mr. 
Romer. Contrasted with his sinister relative, Mr. 



570 WOOD AND STONE 

John Goring was, after all, no more than a rough 
simpleton. 

Meanwhile, on Leo's Hill, an event of tragic sig- 
nificance had occurred. It will be remembered that 
the last Lacrima had seen of James Andersen was the 
wild final gesticulation he made, — a sort of mad 
appeal to the Heavens against the assault of invisible 
enemies, — before he vanished from sight on the 
further side of Claudy's Leap. This vanishing just, 
at that point, meant no more to Lacrima than that 
he had probably taken a lower path, but had Gladys 
or Mr. Goring witnessed it, — or any other person 
who knew the topography of the place, — a much 
more startling conclusion would have been inevitable. 
Nor would such a conclusion have been incorrect. 

The unfortunate man, forgetting, in his excitement, 
the existence of the other quarry, the nameless one; 
forgetting in fact that Claudy's Leap was a razor's 
edge between two precipices, had stepped heedlessly 
backwards, after his final appeal to Heaven, and 
fallen, without a cry, straight into the gulf. 

The height of his fall would, in any case, have 
probably killed him, but as it was "he dashed his 
head," in the language of the Bible, "against a stone"; 
and in less than a second after his last cry, his soul, 
to use the expression of a more pagan scripture, 
"was driven, murmuring, into the Shades." 

It fell to the lot, therefore, not of Luke, who did 
not return from Weymouth till late that evening, 
but of a motley band of holiday-makers from the 
hill-top Inn, to discover the madman's fate. Arriv- 
ing at the spot almost immediately after the girls' 
departure, these honest revellers — strangers to the 



CAESAR'S QUARRY 571 

locality — had quickly found the explanation of the 
unearthly cries they had heard. 

The eve of the baptism of Mr. Romer's daughter 
was celebrated, therefore, by the baptism of the 
nameless quarry. Henceforth, in the neighbourhood 
of Nevilton, the place was never known by any 
other appellation than that of "Jimmy's Drop"; and 
by that name any future visitors, curious to observe 
the site of so singular an occurrence, will have to 
enquire for it, as they drink their pint of cider in the 
Half-Moon Tavern. 



CHAPTER XXII 
A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 

LUKE ANDERSEN'S trip to Weymouth proved 
most charming and eventful. He had scarcely 
emerged from the crowded station, with its 
row of antique omnibuses and its lethargic phalanx 
of expectant out-porters and bath-chair men, — each 
one of whom was a crusted epitome of ingrained 
quaintness, — when he caught sight of Phyllis Santon 
and Annie Bristow strolling laughingly towards the 
sea-front. They must have walked to Yeoborough 
and entered the train there, for he had seen nothing 
of them at Nevilton Station. 

The vivacious Polly, a lively little curly-haired 
child, of some seventeen summers, was far too happy 
and thrilled by the adventure of the excursion and 
the holiday air of the sea-side, to indulge in any jeal- 
ous fits. She was the first of the two, indeed, to greet 
the elder girls, both of them quite well known to 
her, running rapidly after them, in her white stiffly- 
starched print frock, and hailing them with a shout 
of joyous recognition. 

The girls turned quickly and they all three awaited, 
in perfect good temper, the stone-carver's deliberate 
approach. Never had the spirits of this latter been 
higher, or his surroundings more congenial to his mood. 

Anxious not to lose any single one of the exquisite 
sounds, sights, smells, and intimations, which came 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 573 

pouring in upon him, as he leisurely drifted out upon 
the sunny street, he let his little companion run after 
his two friends as fast as she wished, and watched with 
serene satisfaction the airy flight of her light figure, 
with the deep blue patch of sea-line at the end of 
the street as its welcome background. 

The smell of sea-weed, the sound of the waves 
on the beach, the cries of the fish-mongers, and the 
coming and going of the whole heterogeneous crowd, 
filled Luke's senses with the same familiar thrill of 
indescribable pleasure as he had known, on such an 
occasion, from his earliest childhood. The gayly 
piled fruit heaped up on the open stalls, the little 
tobacco-shops with their windows full of half-senti- 
mental half-vulgar picture-cards, the weather-worn 
fronts of the numerous public-houses, the wood- 
work of whose hospitable doors always seemed to him 
endowed with a peculiar mellowness of their own, — 
all these things, as they struck his attentive senses, 
revived the most deeply-felt stirrings of old as- 
sociations. 

Especially did he love the sun-bathed atmosphere, 
so languid with holiday ease, which seemed to float 
in and out of the open lodging-house entrances, 
where hung those sun-dried sea-weeds and wooden 
spades and buckets, which ever-fresh installments of 
bare-legged children carried off and replaced. Luke 
always maintained that of all mortal odours he loved 
best the indescribable smell of the hall-way of a sea- 
side lodging-house, where the very oil-cloth on the 
floor, and the dead bull-rushes in the corner, seemed 
impregnanted with long seasons of salt-burdened sun- 
filled air. 



574 WOOD AND STONE 

The fish-shops, the green-grocer's shops, the second- 
hand book-shops, and most of all, those delicious 
repositories of sea-treasures — foreign importations all 
glittering with mother-of-pearl, dried sea-horses, sea- 
sponges, sea-coral, and wonderful little boxes all 
pasted over with shimmering shells — filled him with 
a delight as vivid and new as when he had first 
encountered them in remote infancy. 

This first drifting down to the sea's edge, after 
emerging from the train, always seemed to Luke 
the very supremacy of human happiness. The bare 
legs of the children, little and big, who ran laughing 
or crying past him and the tangled curls of the 
elder damsels, tossed so coquettishly back from their 
sun-burnt faces, the general feeling of irresponsibility 
in the air, the tang of adventure in it all, of the un- 
expected, the chance-born, always wrapped him about 
in an epicurean dream of pleasure. 

That monotonous splash of the waves against the 
pebbles, — how he associated it with endless exquisite 
flirtations, — flirtations conducted with adorable shame- 
lessness between the blue sky and the blue sea! The 
memory of these, the vague memory of enchanting 
forms prone or supine upon the glittering sands, with 
the passing and re-passing of the same plump bath- 
ing-woman, — he had known her since his child- 
hood ! — and the same donkeys with their laughing 
burdens, and the same sweet-sellers with their trays, 
almost made him cry aloud with delight, as emerging 
at length upon the Front, and overtaking his friends 
at the Jubilee Clock-Tower, he saw the curved expanse 
of the bay lying magically spread out before him. How 
well he knew it all, and how inexpressibly he loved it! 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 575 

The tide was on its outward ebb when the four 
happy companions jumped down, hand in hand, from 
the esplanade to the shingle. The long dark windrow 
of broken shells and seaweed drew a pleasant dividing 
line between the dry and the wet sand. Luke always 
associated the stranded star-fish and jelly-fish and 
bits of scattered drift-wood which that windrow 
offered, with those other casually tossed-up treasures 
with which an apparently pagan-minded providence 
had bestrewn his way! 

Once well out upon the sands, and while the girls, 
with little shrieks and bursts of merriment, were 
pushing one another into the reach of the tide, Luke 
turned to survey with a deep sigh of satisfaction, the 
general appearance of the animated scene. 

The incomparable watering-place, — with its charm- 
ing "after-glow," as Mr. Hardy so beautifully puts 
it, "of Georgian gaiety," — had never looked so 
fascinating as it looked this August afternoon. 

The queer old-fashioned bathing-machines, one of 
them still actually carrying the Lion and Unicorn 
upon its pointed roof, glittered in the sunshine with 
an air of welcoming encouragement. The noble sweep 
of the houses behind the crescent-shaped esplanade, 
with the names of their terraces — Brunswick, 
Regent, Gloucester, Adelaide — so suggestive of the 
same historic epoch, gleamed with reciprocal hospi- 
tality; nor did the tall spire of St. John's Church, a 
landmark for miles round, detract from the harmony 
of the picture. 

On Luke's left, as he turned once more and faced 
the sea, the vibrating summer air, free at present 
from any trace of mist, permitted a wide and lovely 



576 WOOD AND STONE 

view of the distant cliffs enclosing the bay. The 
great White Horse, traced upon the chalk hills, seemed 
within an hour's walk of where he stood, and the 
majestic promontory of the White Nore drew the 
eye onward to where, at the end of the visible coast- 
line, St. Alban's Head sank into the sea. 

On Luke's right the immediate horizon was blocked 
by the grassy eminence known to dwellers in Wey- 
mouth as "the Nothe"; but beyond this, and beyond 
the break-water which formed an extension of it, 
the huge bulk of Portland — Mr. Hardy's Isle of the 
Slingers — rose massive and shadowy against the 
west. 

As he gazed with familiar pleasure at this un- 
equalled view, Luke could not help thinking to him- 
self how strangely the pervading charm of scenes of 
this kind is enhanced by personal and literary asso- 
ciation. He recalled the opening chapters of "The 
Well-Beloved," that curiously characteristic fantasy- 
sketch of the great Wessex novelist; and he also 
recalled those amazing descriptions in Victor Hugo's 
"L'Homme qui Rit," which deal with these same 
localities. 

Shouts of girlish laughter distracted him at last 
from his exquisite reverie, and flinging himself down on 
the hot sand he gave himself up to enjoyment. Hold- 
ing her tight by either hand, the two elder girls, their 
skirts already drenched with salt-water, were dragging 
their struggling companion across the foamy sea- 
verge. The white surf flowed beneath their feet and 
their screams and laughter rang out across the bay. 

Luke called to them that he was going to paddle, 
and implored them to do the same. He preferred 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 577 

to entice them thus into the deeper water, rather 
than to anticipate for them a return home with 
ruined petticoats and wet sand-filled shoes. Seeing 
him leisurely engaged in removing his boots and socks 
and turning up his trousers, the three exuberant 
young people hurried back to his side and proceeded 
with their own preparations. 

Soon, all four of them, laughing and splashing one 
another with water, were blissfully wading along the 
shore, interspersing their playful teasing with alter- 
nate complimentary and disparaging remarks, relative 
to the various bathers whose isolation they in- 
vaded. 

Luke's spirits rose higher and higher. No youth- 
ful Triton, with his attendant Nereids, could have 
expressed more vividly in his radiant aplomb, the 
elemental energy of air and sea. His ecstatic delight 
seemed to reach its culmination as a group of extraor- 
dinarily beautiful children came wading towards 
them, their sunny hair and pearl-bright limbs gleam- 
ing against the blue water. 

At the supreme moment of this ecstasy, however, 
came a sudden pang of contrary emotion, — of dark 
fear and gloomy foreboding. For a sudden passing 
second, there rose before him, — it was now about 
half-past four in the afternoon, — the image of his 
brother, melancholy and taciturn, his heart broken 
by Lacrima's trouble. And then, like a full dark 
tide rolling in upon him, came that ominous reaction, 
spoken of by the old pagan writers, and regarded by 
them as the shadow of the jealousy of the Immortal 
Gods, envious of human pleasure — the reaction to the 
fare of the Eumenides. 



578 WOOD AND STONE 

His companions remained as gay and charming as 
ever. Nothing could have been prettier than to 
watch the mixture of audacity and coyness with 
which they twisted their frocks round them, nothing 
more amusing than to note the differences of character 
between the three, as they betrayed their naive souls 
in their childish abandonment to the joy of the hour. 

Both Phyllis and Annie were tall and slender and 
dark. But there the likeness between them ceased. 
Annie had red pouting lips, the lower one of which 
protruded a little beyond its fellow, giving her face 
in repose a quite deceptive look of sullenness and petu- 
lance. Her features were irregular and a little heavy, 
the beauty of her countenance residing in the shadowy 
coils of dusky hair which surmounted it, and in the 
velvet softness of her large dark eyes. For all the 
heaviness of her face, Annie's expression was one of 
childlike innocence and purity; and when she flirted 
or made love, she did so with a clinging affectionate- 
ness and serious gravity which had much of the 
charm of extreme youth. 

Phyllis, on the contrary, had softly outlined features 
of the most delicate regularity, while from her hazel 
eyes and laughing parted lips perpetual defiant pro- 
vocations of alluring mischief challenged everyone 
she approached. Annie was the more loving of the 
two, Phyllis the more lively and amorous. Both of 
them made constant fun of their little curly-headed 
companion, whose direct boyish ways and whimsical 
speeches kept them in continual peals of merriment. 

Tired at last of paddling, they all waded to the 
shore, and crossing the warm powdery sand, which is 
one of the chief attractions of the place, they sat 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 579 

down on the edge of the shingle and dried their feet 
in the sun. 

Reassuming their shoes and stockings, and de- 
murely shaking down their skirts, the three girls 
followed the now rather silent Luke to the little tea- 
house opposite the Clock-Tower, in an upper room of 
which, looking out on the sea, were several pleasant 
window-seats furnished with convenient tables. 

The fragrant tea, the daintiness of its accessories, 
the fresh taste of the bread and butter, not to speak 
of the inexhaustible spirits of his companions, soon 
succeeded in dispelling the stone-carver's momentary 
depression. 

When the meal was over, as their train was not 
due to leave till nearly seven, and it was now hardly 
five, Luke decided to convey his little party across 
the harbour-ferry. They strolled out of the shop 
into the sunshine, not before the stone-carver had 
bestowed so lavish a tip upon the little waitress that 
his companions exchanged glances of feminine dismay. 

They took the road through the old town to reach 
the ferry, following the southern of the two parallel 
streets that debouch from the Front at the point 
where stands the old-fashioned equestrian statue of 
George the Third. Luke nourished in his heart a 
sentimental tenderness for this simple monarch, 
vaguely and quite erroneously associating the royal 
interest in the place with his own dreamy attachment 
to it. 

When they reached the harbour they found it in a 
stir of excitement owing to the arrival of the pas- 
senger-boat from the Channel Islands, one of the 
red-funneled modern successors to those antique 



580 WOOD AND STONE 

paddle-steamers whose first excursions must have 
been witnessed from his Guernsey refuge by the author 
of the "Toilers of the Deep." Side by side with the 
smartly painted ship, were numerous schooners and 
brigs, hailing from more northern regions, whose 
cargoes were being unloaded by a motley crowd of 
clamorous dock-hands. 

Luke and his three companions turned to the left 
when they reached the water's edge and strolled along 
between the warehouses and the wharves until they 
arrived at the massive bridge which crosses the 
harbour. Leaning upon the parapet, whose whitish- 
grey fabric indicated that the dominion of Leo's 
Hill gave place here to the noble Portland Stone, 
they surveyed with absorbed interest the busy scene 
beneath them. 

The dark greenish-colored water swirled rapidly 
seaward in the increasing ebb of the tide. White- 
winged sea-gulls kept swooping down to its surface 
and rising again in swift air-cutting curves, balancing 
their glittering bodies against the slanting sunlight. 
Every now and then a boat-load of excursionists 
would shoot out from beneath the shadow of the 
wharves and shipping, and cross obliquely the swift- 
flowing tide to the landing steps on the further shore. 

The four friends moved to the northern parapet of 
the bridge, and the girls gave little cries of delight, 
to see, at no great distance, where the broad expanse 
of the back-water began to widen, a group of stately 
swans, rocking serenely on the shining waves. They 
remained for some while, trying to attract these 
birds by flinging into the water bits of broken cake, 
saved by the economic-minded Annie from the recent 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 581 

repast. But these offerings only added new spoil to 
the plunder of the greedy sea-gulls, from whose 
rapid movements the more aristocratic inland crea- 
tures kept haughtily aloof. 

Preferring to use the ferry for their crossing rather 
than the bridge, Luke led his friends back, along the 
wharves, till they reached the line of slippery steps 
about which loitered the lethargic owners of the ferry- 
boats. With engaging alarm, and pretty gasps and 
murmurs of half-simulated panic, the three young 
damsels were helped down into one of these rough 
receptacles, and the bare-necked, affable oarsman pro- 
ceeded, with ponderous leisureliness, to row them across. 

As the heavy oars rattled in their rowlocks, and the 
swirling tide gurgled about the keels, Luke, seated 
in the stern, between Annie and Phyllis, felt once 
more a thrilling sense of his former emotion. With 
one hand round Phyllis' waist, and the other caress- 
ing Annie's gloveless fingers, he permitted his gaze to 
wander first up, then down, the flowing tide. 

Far out to sea, he perceived a large war-ship, like 
a great drowsy sea-monster, lying motionless be- 
tween sky and wave; and sweeping in, round the little 
pier's point, came a light full-sailed skiff, with the 
water foaming across its bows. 

With the same engaging trepidation in his country- 
bred comrades, they clambered up the landing-steps, 
the lower ones of which were covered with green 
sea-weed, and the upper ones worn smooth as marble 
by long use, and thence emerged upon the little 
narrow jetty, bordering upon the harbour's edge. 

Here were a row of the most enchanting eighteenth 
century lodging-houses, interspersed, at incredibly 



582 WOOD AND STONE 

frequent spaces, by small antique inns, bearing quaint 
names drawn from British naval history. 

Skirting the grassy slopes of the Nothe, with its 
old-fashioned fort, they rounded the small promon- 
tory and climbed down among the rocks and rock- 
pools which lay at its feet. It was pretty to observe 
the various flutterings and agitations, and to hear 
the shouts of laughter and delight with which the 
young girls followed Luke over these perilous and 
romantic obstacles, and finally paused at his side 
upon a great sun-scorched shell-covered rock, sur- 
rounded by foamy water. 

The wind was cool in this exposed spot, and hold- 
ing their hats in their hands the little party gave 
themselves up to the freedom and freshness of air 
and sea. 

But the wandering interest of high-spirited youth 
is as restless as the waves. Very soon Phyllis and 
Polly had drifted away from the others, and were 
climbing along the base of the cliff above, filling their 
hands with sea-pinks and sea-lavender, which attracted 
them by their glaucous foliage. 

Left to themselves, Luke removed his shoes and 
stockings, and dangled his feet over the rock's edge, 
while Annie, prone upon her face, the sunshine 
caressing her white neck and luxuriant hair, stretched 
her long bare arms into the cool water. 

Leaning across the prostrate form of his companion, 
and gazing down into the deep recesses of the tidal 
pool which separated the rock they reclined on from 
the one behind it, the stone-carver was able to make 
out the ineffably coloured tendrils and soft translucent 
shapes of several large sea-anemones, submerged 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 583 

beneath the greenish water. He pointed these out 
to his companion, who moving round a little, and 
tucking up her sleeves still higher, endeavoured to 
reach them with her hand. In this she was defeated, 
for the deceptive water was much deeper than either 
of them supposed. 

"What are those darling little shells, down there 
at the bottom, Luke?" she whispered. Luke, with 
his arm round her neck, and his head close to hers, 
peered down into the shadowy depths. 

"They're some kind of cowries," he said at last, 
"shells that in Africa, I believe, they use as money." 

"I wish they were money here," murmured the 
girl, "I'd buy mother one of those silver brushes 
we saw in the shop." 

"Listen!" cried Luke, and taking a penny from 
his pocket he let it fall into the water. They both 
fancied they heard a little metallic sound when it 
struck the bottom. 

Suddenly Annie gave a queer excited laugh, shook 
herself free from her companion's arm, and scrambled 
up on her knees. Luke lay back on the rock and 
gazed in wonder at her flushed cheeks and flashing 
eyes. 

"What's the matter, child?" he enquired. 

She fumbled at her bosom, and Luke noticed for the 
first time that she was wearing round her neck a 
little thin metal chain. At last with an impatient 
movement of her fingers she snapped the resisting 
cord and flung it into the tide. Then she held out 
to Luke a small golden object, which glittered in the 
palm of her hand. It was a weather-stained ring, 
twisted and bent out of all shape. 



584 WOOD AND STONE 

"It's her ring!" she cried exultantly. "Crazy Bert 
got it out of that hole, with a bit of bent wire, and 
Phyllis squirmed it away from him by letting him 
give her a lift in the wagon. He squeezed her dread- 
ful hard, she do say, and tickled her awful with 
straws and things, but before evening she had the 
ring away from him. You can bet I kissed her and 
thanked her, when I got it! Us two be real friends, 
as you might call it! Phyllis, cried, in the night, 
dreaming the idiot was pinching her, and she not 
able to slap 'im back. But I got the ring, and there 't 
be, Luke, glittering-gold as ever, though 'tis sad 
bended and battered." 

Luke made a movement to take the object, but 
the girl closed her fingers tightly upon it and held it 
high above his head. With her arm thus raised and 
the glitter of sea and sun upon her form, she resem- 
bled some sweetly-carved figure-head on the bows of 
a ship. The wind fanned her hot cheeks and caressed, 
with cool touch, her splendid coils of hair. Luke was 
quite overcome by her beauty, and could only stare 
at her in dazed amazement, while she repeated, in 
clear ringing tones, the words of the old country 
game. 

"My lady's lost her golden ring; 

Her golden ring, her golden ring; 
My lady's lost her golden ring; 

I pitch upon you to find it!" 

The song's refrain died away over the waves, and 
was answered by the scream of an astonished cor- 
morant, and by a mocking shout from a group of 
idle soldiers on the grassy terrace above the cliff. 

"Shall us throw her ring out to sea?" cried Annie. 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 585 

"They say a ring lost so, means sorrow for her that 
owns it. Say 'y es >' and it's gone, Luke!" 

While the girl's arm swung backwards and forwards 
above him, the stone-carver's thoughts whirled even 
more rapidly through his brain. A drastic and bold 
idea, that had often before crossed the threshold of 
his consciousness, now assumed a most dominant 
shape. Why not ask Annie to marry him? 

He was growing a little weary of his bachelor-life, 
The wayward track of his days had more than once, 
of late, seemed to have reached a sort of climax. 
Why not, at one reckless stroke, end this epoch of 
his history, and launch out upon another? His close 
association with James had hitherto stood in the way 
of any such step, but his brother had fallen recently 
into such fits of gloomy reticence, that he had found 
himself wondering more than once whether such a 
drastic troubling of the waters, as the introduction 
of a girl into their menage, would not ease the situa- 
tion a little. It was not for a moment to be sup- 
posed that he and James could separate. If Annie 
did marry him, she must do so on the understanding 
of his brother's living with them. 

Luke began to review in his mind the various cot- 
tages in Nevilton which might prove available for this 
adventure. It tickled his fancy a great deal, the 
thought of having a house and garden of his own, and 
he was shrewd enough to surmise that of all his 
feminine friends, Annie was by far the best fitted to 
perform the functions of the good-tempered companion 
of a philosophical sentimentalist. The gentle creature 
had troubled him so little by jealous fits in her role 
of sweetheart, that it did not present itself as 



586 WOOD AND STONE 

probable that she would prove a shrewish wife. 
Glancing across the blue water to the great Rock- 
Island opposite them, Luke came rapidly to the con- 
clusion that he would take the risk and make the 
eventful plunge. He knew enough of himself to have 
full confidence in his power of dealing with the deli- 
cate art of matrimony, and the very difficulties of the 
situation, implied in the number of his contemporary 
amours, only added a tang and piquancy to the 
enterprise. 

"Well," cried Annie. "Shall us throw the pretty 
lady's ring into the deep sea? It'll mean trouble 
for her, trouble and tears, Luke! Be 'ee of a mind 
to do it, or be 'ee not? 'Tis your hand must fling it, 
and with the flinging of it, her heart '11 drop, splash 
— splash — into deep sorrow. She'll cry her eyes 
out, for this 'ere job, and that's the truth of it, 
Luke darling. Be 'ee ready to fling it, or be 'ee 
not ready? There'll be no getting it back, once us 
have thro wed it in." 

She held out her arm towards him as she spoke, 
and with her other hand pushed back her hair from 
her forehead. For so soft and tender a creature as 
the girl was, it was strange, the wild Maenad-like 
look, which she wore at that moment. She might 
have been an incarnation of the avenging deities of 
sea and air, threatening disaster to some unwitting 
Olympian. 

Luke scrambled to his feet, and seizing her wrist 
with both his hands, forced her fingers apart, and 
possessed himself of the equivocal trinket. 

"If I throw it," he cried, in an excited tone, "will 
you be my wife, Annie?" 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 587 

At this unexpected word a complete collapse over- 
took the girl. All trace of colour left her cheeks and 
a sudden trembling passed through her limbs. She 
staggered, and would have fallen, if Luke had not 
seized her in his arms. 

In the shock of saving her, the stone-carver's hand 
involuntarily unclosed, and the piece of gold, slipping 
from his fingers, fell down upon the slope of the rock, 
and sliding over its edge, sank into the deep water. 

"Annie! Annie! What is it, dear?" murmured 
Luke, making the trembling girl sit down by his side, 
and supporting her tenderly. 

For her only answer she flung her arms round his 
neck and kissed him passionately again and again. It 
was not only of kisses that Luke became conscious, 
for, as she pressed him to her, her breast heaved 
pitifully under her print frock, and when she let him 
go, the taste of her tears was in his mouth. For the 
first time in his life the queer wish entered the stone- 
carver's mind that he had not, in his day, made love 
quite so often. 

There was something so pure, so confiding, and 
yet so passionately tender, about little Annie's 
abandonment, that it produced, in the epicurean 
youth's soul, a most quaint sense of shame and em- 
barrassment. It was deliciously sweet to him, all 
the same, to find how, beyond expectation, he had 
made so shrewd a choice. But he wished some 
humorous demon at the back of his mind wouldn't 
call up before him at that moment the memory of 
other clinging arms and lips. 

With an inward grin of sardonic commentary upon 
his melting mood, the cynical thought passed through 



588 WOOD AND STONE 

his mind, how strange it was, in this mortal world, 
that human kisses should all so lamentably resemble 
one another, and that human tears should all leave 
behind them the same salt taste! Life was indeed a 
matter of "eternal recurrence," and whether with 
Portland and its war-ships as the background, or 
with Nevilton Mount and its shady woods, the same 
emotions and the same reactions must needs come 
and go, with the same inexorable monotony! 

He glanced down furtively into the foam-flecked 
water, but there was no sign of the lost ring. The 
tide seemed to have turned now, and the sea appeared 
less calm. Little flukes of white spray surged up 
intermittently on the in-rolling waves, and a strong 
breath of wind, rising with the sinking of the sun, 
blew cool and fresh upon their foreheads. 

"Her ring's gone," whispered Annie, pulling down 
her sleeves over her soft arms, and holding out her 
wrists, for him to fasten the bands, "and you do 
belong to none but I now, Luke. When shall us be 
married, dear?" she added, pressing her cool cheek 
against his, and running her fingers through his hair. 

The words, as well as the gesture that accompanied 
them, jarred upon Luke's susceptibilities. 

"Why is it," he thought, "that girls are so ex- 
traordinarily stupid in these things? Why do they 
always seem only waiting for an opportunity to drop 
their piquancy and provocation, and become confident, 
assured, possessive, complacent? Have I," he said to 
himself, "made a horrible blunder? Shall I regret 
this day forever, and be ready to give anything for 
those fatal words not to have been uttered?" 

He glanced down once more upon the brimming, 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 589 

in-rushing tide that covered Glady's ring. Then with 
a jerk he pulled out his watch. 

"Go and call the others," he commanded, "I'm 
going to have a dip before we start." 

Annie glanced quickly into his face, but reassured 
by his friendly smile, proceeded to obey him, with 
only the least little sigh. 

"Don't drown yourself, dear," she called back to 
him, as she made her way cautiously across the rocks. 

Luke hurriedly undressed, and standing for a mo- 
ment, a slim golden figure, in the horizontal sunlight, 
swung himself lightly down over the rock's edge and 
struck out boldly for the open sea. 

With vigorous strokes he wrestled with the inflow- 
ing tide. Wave after wave splashed against his 
face. Pieces of floating sea-weed and wisps of surf 
clung to his arms and hair. But he held resolutely 
on, breathing deep breaths of liberty and exultation, 
and drinking in, as if from a vast wide-brimmed cup, 
the thrilling spaciousness of air and sky. 

Girls, love-making, marriage, — the whole com- 
plication of the cloying erotic world, — fell away from 
him, like the too-soft petals of some great stifling 
velvet-bosomed flower; and naked of desire, as he was 
naked of human clothes, he gave himself up to the 
free, pure elements. In later hours, when once more 
the old reiterated tune was beating time in his brain, 
he recalled with regret the large emancipation of that 
moment. 

As he splashed and spluttered, and turned over 
deliciously in the water, like some exultant human- 
limbed merman, returning, after a long inland exile, 
to his natural home, he found his thoughts fantastic- 



590 WOOD AND STONE 

ally reverting to those queer, mad ideas, about the 
evil power of the stone they both worked upon, to 
which James Andersen had given expression when his 
wits were astray. Here at any rate, in the solid 
earth's eternal antagonist, was a power capable of 
destroying every sinister spell. 

He remorsefully blamed himself that he had not 
compelled his brother to come down with them to 
the sea. He recalled the half-hearted invitation he 
had extended to James, not altogether sorry to have 
it refused, and not repeating it. He had been a selfish 
fool, he thought. Were James swimming now by his 
side, his pleasure in that violet-coloured coast-line and 
that titanic rock-monster, would have been doubled 
by the revival of indescribably appealing memo- 
ries. 

He made a vigorous resolution that never again — 
whatever mood his brother might be in — would he 
allow the perilous lure of exquisite femininity, to come 
between him and the nobler classic bond, of the 
love that "passeth the love of women." 

Conscious that he must return without a moment's 
further delay if they were to catch their train, he 
swung round in the water and let the full tide bear 
him shoreward. 

On the way back he was momentarily assailed by 
a slight touch of cramp in his legs. It quickly 
passed, but it was enough to give the life-enamoured 
youth a shock of cold panic. Death? That, after 
all, he thought, was the only intolerable thing. As 
long as one breathed and moved, in this mad world, 
nothing that could happen greatly mattered! One 
was conscious, — one could note the acts and scenes 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 591 

of the incredible drama; and in this mere fact of 
consciousness, one could endure anything. But to be 
dead, — to be deprived of the sweet air, — that 
remained, that must always remain, the one absolute 
Terror ! 

Reaching his starting-place, Luke was amused to 
observe that the tide was already splashing over 
their rock, and in another minute or two would have 
drenched his clothes. He chuckled to himself as he 
noted how this very practical possibility jerked his 
mind into a completely different vein. Love, philoso- 
phy, friendship, all tend to recede to the very depths 
of one's invaluable consciousness, when there appears 
a risk of returning to a railway station in a drenched 
shirt. 

He collected his possessions with extreme rapidity, 
and holding them in a bundle at arm's length from 
his dripping body, clambered hastily up the shore, 
and humorously waving back his modest companions, 
who were now being chaffed by quite a considerable 
group of soldiers on the cliff above, he settled himself 
down on a bank of sea-weed and began hurriedly to 
dry, using his waistcoat as a towel. 

He was soon completely dressed, and, all four of 
them a little agitated, began a hasty rush for the 
train. 

Phyllis and Polly scolded him all the way without 
mercy. Had he brought them out here, to keep them 
in the place all night? What would their mothers 
say, and their fathers, and their brothers, and their 
aunts? 

Annie, alone of the party, remained silent, her full 
rich lips closed like a sleepy peony, and her heavy- 



592 WOOD AND STONE 

lidded velvety eyes casting little timid affectionate 
glances at her so unexpectedly committed lover. 

The crossness of the two younger girls grew in 
intensity when, the ferry safely crossed, Luke dragged 
them at remorseless speed through the crowded town. 
Pitiful longing eyes were cast back at the glittering 
shops and the magical picture-shows. Why had he 
taken them to those horrid rocks? Why hadn't he 
given them time to look at the shop- windows? 
They'd promised faithfully to bring back something 
for Dad and Betty and Queenie and Dick. 

Phyllis had ostentatiously flung into the harbour 
her elaborately selected bunch of sea-flora, and the 
poor ill-used plants, hot from the girl's hand, were 
now tossing up and down amid the tarry keels and 
swaying hawsers. The girl regretted this action 
now, — regretted it more and more vividly as the 
station drew near. Mummy always loved a bunch 
o' flowers, and they were so pretty! She was sure it 
was Luke who had made her lose them. He had 
pushed her so roughly up those nasty steps. 

Tears were in Polly's eyes as, bedraggled and 
panting, they emerged on the open square where the 
gentle monarch looks down from his stone horse. 
There were sailors now, mixed with the crowd on the 
esplanade, — such handsome boys! It was cruel, it 
was wicked, that they had to go, just when the real 
sport began. 

The wretched Jubilee Clock — how they all hated 
its trim appearance ! — had a merciless finger pointing 
at the very minute their train was due to start, as 
Luke hurried them round the street-corner. Polly 
fairly began to cry, as they dragged her from the 



A ROYAL WATERING-PLACE 593 

alluring scene. She was certain that the Funny Men 
were just going to begin. She was sure that that 
distant drum meant Punch and Judy! 

Breathlessly they rushed upon the platform. 
Wildly, with anxious eyes and gasping tones, they 
enquired of the first official they encountered, whether 
the Yeoborough train had gone. 

Observing the beauty of the three troubled girls, 
this placid authority proceeded to tantalize them, 
asking "what the hurry was," and whether they 
wanted a "special," and other maddening questions. 
It was only when Luke, who had rushed furiously to 
the platform's remote end, was observed to be cheer- 
fully and serenely returning, that Phyllis recovered 
herself sufficiently to give their disconcerted insulter 
what she afterwards referred to as "a bit of lip in 
return for his blarsted sauce." 

No, — the train would not be starting for another 
ten minutes. Fortunate indeed was this accident of 
a chance delay on the Great Western Railroad, — the 
most punctual of all railroads in the world, — for it 
landed Luke with three happy, completely recovered 
damsels, and in a compartment all to themselves, 
when the train did move at last. Abundantly 
fortified with ginger-pop and sponge-cake, — how 
closely Luke associated the savour of both these 
refreshments with such an excursion as this ! — and 
further cheered by the secure possession of chocolates, 
bananas, "Ally Sloper's Half Holiday," and the "Illus- 
trated London News," — the girls romped, and sang, 
and teased each other and Luke, and whispered 
endearing mockeries out of the window to sedately 
unconscious gentlemen, at every station where they 



594 WOOD AND STONE 

stopped until the aged guard's paternal benevolence 
changed to irritable crossness, and Luke himself was 
not altogether sorry when the familiar landscape of 
Yeoborough, dusky and shadowy in the twilight, 
hove in sight. 

Little Polly left them at the second of the two 
Yeoborough stations, and the others, crowding at 
the window to wave their goodbyes, were carried on 
in the same train to Nevilton. 

During this final five minutes, Annie slipped softly 
down upon her lover's knees and seemed to wish to 
indicate to Phyllis, without the use of words, that her 
relations with their common friend were now on a 
new plane, — at once more innocent and less reserved. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

AVE ATQUE VALE! 

JAMES ANDERSEN lay dead in the brothers' 
little bedroom at the station-master's cottage. 
It could not be maintained that his face wore the 
unruffled calm conventionally attributed to mortality's 
last repose. On the other hand, his expression was not 
that of one who has gone down in hopeless despair. 

What his look really conveyed to his grief-worn 
brother, as he hung over him all that August night, 
was the feeling that he had been struck in mid- 
contest, with equal chance of victory or defeat, and 
with the indelible imprint upon his visage of the stress 
and strain of the terrific struggle. 

It was a long and strange vigil that Luke found 
himself thus bound to keep, when the first paroxysm 
of his grief had subsided and his sympathetic landlady 
had left him alone with his dead. 

He laughed aloud, — a merciless little laugh, — at 
one point in the night, to note how even this blow, 
rending as it did the very ground beneath his feet, 
had yet left quite untouched and untamed his irre- 
sistible instinct towards self-analysis. Not a single 
one of the innumerable, and in many cases astound- 
ing, thoughts that passed through his mind, but he 
watched it, and isolated it, and played with it, — just 
in the old way. 

Luke was not by any means struck dumb or 



596 WOOD AND STONE 

paralyzed by this event. His intelligence had never 
been more acute, or his senses more responsive, than 
they remained through those long hours of watching. 

It is true he could neither eat nor sleep. The influ- 
ence of the motionless figure beside him seemed to 
lie in a vivid and abnormal stimulation of all his 
intellectual faculties. 

Not a sound arose from the sleeping house, from 
the darkened fields, from the distant village, but he 
noted it and made a mental record of its cause. He 
kept two candles alight at his brother's head, three 
times refilling the candlesticks, as though the gutter- 
ing and hissing of the dwindling flames would tease 
and disturb the dead. 

He had been careful to push the two windows of 
the room wide open; but the night was so still that 
not a breath of wind entered to make the candles 
flicker, or to lift the edge of the white sheet stretched 
beneath his brother's bandaged chin. This horrible 
bandage, — one of the little incidents that Luke 
marked as unexpectedly ghastly, — seemed to slip its 
knot at a certain moment, causing the dead man's 
mouth to fall open, in a manner that made the 
watcher shudder, so suggestive did it seem of one 
about to utter a cry for help. 

Luke noted, as another factor in the phenomena of 
death, the peculiar nature of the coldness of his 
brother's skin, as he bent down once and again to 
touch his forehead. It was different from the coldness 
of water or ice or marble. It was a clammy coldness; 
the coldness of a substance that was neither — in the 
words of the children's game — "animal, vegetable, 
nor mineral." 



AVE ATQUE VALE 597 

Luke remembered the story of that play of Web- 
ster's, in which the unhappy heroine, in the blank 
darkness of her dungeon, is presented with a dead 
hand to caress. The abominably wicked wish crossed 
his mind once, as he unclosed those stark fingers, that 
he could cause the gentle Lacrima, whom he regarded, 
— not altogether fairly, — as responsible for his 
brother's death, to feel the touch of such a hand. 

There came over him, at other times, as he inhaled 
the cool, hushed air from the slumbering fields, and 
surveyed the great regal planet, — Mr. Romer's star, 
he thought grimly, — as it hung so formidably close 
to the silvery pallid moon, a queer dreamy feeling 
that the whole thing were a scene in a play or a 
story, absolutely unreal; and that he would only 
have to rouse himself and shake off the unnatural 
spell, to have his brother with him again, alive and in 
full consciousness. 

The odd thing about it was that he found himself 
refusing to believe that this was his brother at all, — 
this mask beneath the white sheet, — and even 
fancying that at any moment the familiar voice 
might call to him from the garden, and he have to 
descend to unlock the door. 

That thought of his brother's voice sent a pang 
through him of sick misgiving. Surely it couldn't 
be possible, that never, not through the whole of 
eternity, would he hear that voice again? 

He moved to the window and listened. Owls were 
hooting somewhere up at Wild Pine, and from the 
pastures towards Hullaway came the harsh cry of a 
night-jar. 

He gazed up at the glittering heavens, sprinkled 



598 WOOD AND STONE 

with those proud constellations whose identity it was 
one of his pastimes to recognize. How little they 
cared! How appallingly little they cared! What a 
farce, what an obscene, unpardonable farce, the whole 
business was! 

He caught the sound of an angry bark in some 
distant yard. 

Luke cursed the irrelevant intrusive noise. "Ah! 
thou vile Larva!" he muttered. "What! Shall a dog, 
a cat, a rat, have life; and thou no breath at all?" 

He leant far out of the window, breathing the 
perfumes of the night. He noticed, as an interesting 
fact, that it was neither the phloxes nor the late roses 
whose scent filled the air, but that new exotic tobacco- 
plant, — a thing whose sticky, quickly-fading, trum- 
pet-shaped petals were one of his brother's especial 
aversions. 

The immense spaces of the night, as they carried 
his gaze onward from one vast translunar sign to 
another, filled him with a strange feeling of the 
utter unimportance of any earthly event. The 
Mythology of Power and the Mythology of Sacrifice 
might wrestle in desperate contention for the mastery; 
but what mattered, in view of this great dome which 
overshadowed them, the victory or the defeat of 
either? Mythologies were they both; both woven 
out of the stuff of dreams, and both vanishing like 
dreams, in the presence of this stark image upon the 
bed! 

He returned to his brother's side, and rocked him- 
self up and down on his creaking bedroom chair. 
"Dead and gone!" he muttered, "dead and gone!" 

It was easy to deal in vague mystic speculation. 



AVE ATQUE VALE 599 

But what relief could he derive, he who wanted his 
brother back as he was, with his actual tones, and 
ways and looks, from any problematic chance that 
some thin "spiritual principle," or ideal wraith, of the 
man were now wandering through remote, unearthly 
regions? The darling of his soul — the heart of his 
heart — had become forever this appalling waxen 
image, this thing that weighed upon him with its 
presence ! 

Luke bent over the dead man. What a personality, 
what a dominant and oppressive personality, a corpse 
has! It is not the personality of the living man, but 
another — a quite different one — masquerading in 
his place. 

Luke felt almost sure that this husk, this shell, 
this mockery of the real James, was possessed of some 
detestable consciousness of its own, a consciousness 
as remote from that of the man he loved as that 
pallid forehead with the deep purple gash across it, 
was remote from the dear head whose form he knew 
so well. How crafty, how malignant, a corpse was! 

He returned to his uncomfortable chair and pon- 
dered upon what this loss meant to him. It was 
like the burying alive of half his being. How could 
he have thoughts, sensations, feelings, fancies; how 
could he have loves and hates, without James to tell 
them to? A cold sick terror of life passed through 
him, of life without this companion of his soul. He 
felt like a child lost in some great forest. 

"Daddy James! Daddy James!" he cried, "I want 
you; — I want you!" 

He found himself repeating this infantile conjura- 
tion over and over again. He battered with clenched 



600 WOOD AND STONE 

hand upon the adamantine wall of silence. But there 
was neither sign nor voice nor token nor "any that 
regarded." There was only the beating of his own 
heart and the ticking of the watch upon the table. 
And all the while, with its malignant cunning, the 
corpse regarded him, mute, derisive, contemptuous. 

He thought, lightly and casually, as one who at the 
grave of all he loves plucks a handful of flowers, of 
the girls he had just parted from, and of Gladys and 
all his other infatuations. How impossible it seemed 
to him that a woman — a girl — that any one of 
these charming, distracting creatures — should strike 
a man down by their loss, as he was now stricken 
down. 

He tried to imagine what he would feel if it were 
Annie lying there, under the sheet, in place of James. 
He would be sorry; he would be bitterly sad; he would 
be angry with the callous heavens; but as long as 
James were near, as long as James were by his side, — 
his life would still be his life. He would suffer, and 
the piteous tragedy of the thing would smite and 
sicken him; but it would not be the same. It would 
not be like this! 

What was there in the love of a man that made 
the loss of it — for him at least — so different a 
thing? Was it that with women, however much one 
loved them, there was something equivocal, evasive, 
intangible; something made up of illusion and 
sorcery, of magic and moonbeams; that since it could 
never be grasped as firmly as the other, could never 
be as missed as the other, when the grasp had to 
relax? Or was it that, for all their clear heads, — 
heads so much clearer than poor James' ! — and for 



AVE ATQUE VALE 601 

all their spiritual purity, — there was lacking in 
them a certain indescribable mellowness of sympathy, 
a certain imaginative generosity and tolerance, which 
meant the true secret of the life lived in com- 
mon? 

From the thought of his girls, Luke's mind wan- 
dered back to the thought of what the constant 
presence of his brother as a background to his life 
had really meant. Even as he sat there, gazing so 
hopelessly at the image on the bed, he found himself 
on the point of resolving to explain all these matters 
to James and hear his opinion upon them. 

By degrees, as the dawn approached, the two 
blank holes into cavernous darkness which the 
windows of the chamber had become, changed their 
character. A faint whitish-blue transparency grew 
visible within their enclosing frames, and something 
ghostly and phantom-like, the stealthy invasion of a 
new presence, glided into the room. 

This palpable presence, the frail embryo of a new 
day, gave to the yellow candle-flames a queer sickly 
pallor and intensified to a chalky opacity the dead 
whiteness of the sheet, and of the folded hands 
resting upon it. It was with the sound of the first 
twittering birds, and the first cock-crow, that the ice- 
cold spear of desolation pierced deepest of all into 
Luke's heart. He shivered, and blew out the candles. 

A curious feeling possessed him that, in a sudden 
ghastly withdrawal, that other James, the James he 
had been turning to all night in tacit familiar appeal, 
had receded far out of his reach. From indistinct 
horizons his muffled voice moaned for a while, like 
the wind in the willows of Lethe, and then died away 



602 WOOD AND STONE 

in a thin long-drawn whisper. Luke was alone; 
alone with his loss and alone with the image of 
death. 

He moved to the window and looked out. Streaks 
of watery gold were already visible above the eastern 
uplands, and a filmy sea of white mist swayed and 
fluttered over the fields. 

All these things together, the white mist, the white 
walls of the room, the white light, the white covering 
on the body, seemed to fall upon the worn-out 
watcher with a weight of irresistible finality. James 
was dead — "gone to his death-bed; — he never 
would come again!" 

Turning his back wearily upon those golden sky- 
streaks, that on any other occasion would have 
thrilled him with their magical promise, Luke observed 
the dead bodies of no less than five large moths 
grouped around the extinct candles. Two of them 
were "currant-moths," one a "yellow under- wing," and 
the others beyond his entomological knowledge. 
This was the only holocaust, then, allowed to the 
dead man. Five moths! And the Milky Way had 
looked down upon their destruction with the same 
placidity as upon the cause of the vigil that slew 
them. 

Luke felt a sudden desire to escape from this room, 
every object of which bore now, in dimly obscure 
letters, the appalling handwriting of the ministers of 
fate. He crept on tiptoe to the door and opened it 
stealthily. Making a mute valedictory gesture towards 
the bed, he shut the door behind him and slipped 
down the little creaking stairs. 

He entered his landlady's kitchen, and as silently 



AVE ATQUE VALE 603 

as he could collected a bundle of sticks and lit the 
fire. The crackling flames produced an infinitesimal 
lifting of the cloud which weighed upon his spirit. 
He warmed his hands before the blaze. From some 
remote depth within him, there began to awake once 
more the old inexpugnable zest for life. 

Piling some pieces of coal upon the burning wood 
and drawing the kettle to the edge of the hob, he left 
the kitchen; and crossing the little hall, impregnated 
with a thin sickly odor of lamp-oil, he shot back the 
blots of the house-door, and let himself out into the 
morning air. 

A flock of starlings fluttered away over the meadow, 
and from the mist-wreathed recesses of Nevilton 
House gardens came the weird defiant scream of a 
peacock. 

He glanced furtively, as if such a glance were 
almost sacrilegious, at the open windows of his 
brother's room; and then pushing open the garden- 
gate emerged into the dew-drenched field. He could 
not bring himself to leave the neighbourhood of the 
house, but began pacing up and down the length of 
the meadow, from the hedge adjacent to the railway, 
to that elm-shadowed corner, where not so many 
weeks ago he had distracted himself with Annie and 
Phyllis. He continued this reiterated pacing, — his 
tired brain giving itself up to the monotony of a 
heart-easing movement, — until the sun had risen 
quite high above the horizon. The great fiery orb 
pleased him well, in its strong indifference, as with its 
lavish beams it dissipated the mist and touched the 
tree-trunks with ruddy colour. 

"Ha!" he cried aloud, "the sun is the only God! 



604 WOOD AND STONE 

To the sun must all flesh turn, if it would live and 
not die!" 

Half ashamed of this revival of his spirits he obeyed 
the beckoning gestures of the station-master's wife, 
who now appeared at the door. 

The good woman's sympathy, though not of the 
silent or tactful order, was well adapted to prevent 
the immediate return of any hopeless grief. 

"'Tis good it were a Saturday when the Lord took 
him," she said, pouring out for her lodger a steaming 
cup of excellent tea, and buttering a slice of bread; 
"he'll have Sunday to lie up in. It be best of all 
luck for these poor stiff ones, to have church bells 
rung over 'em." 

"I pray Heaven I shan't have any visitors today," 
remarked Luke, sipping his tea and stretching out his 
feet to the friendly blaze. 

"That ye'll be sure to have!" answered the woman; 
"and the sooner ye puts on a decent black coat, and 
washes and brushes up a bit, the better 'twill be for 
all concerned. I always tells my old man that when 
he do fall stiff, like what your brother be, I shall put 
on my black silk gown and sit in the front parlour 
with a bottle of elder wine, ready for all sorts and 
conditions." 

Luke rose, with a piece of bread-and-butter in his 
hand, and surveyed himself in the mirror. 

"Yes, I do need a bit of tidying," he said. "Per- 
haps you wouldn't mind my shaving down here?" 

Even as he spoke the young stone-carver could not 
help recalling those sinister stories of dead men whose 
beards have grown in their coffins. The landlady 
nodded. 



AVE ATQUE VALE 605 

"I'll make 'ee up a bed for these 'ere days," she 
said, "in Betty's room. As for shaving and such like, 
please yourself, Master Luke. This house be thy 
house with him lying up there." 

Between nine and ten o'clock Luke's first visitor 
made his appearance. This was Mr. Clavering, who 
showed himself neither surprised nor greatly pleased 
to find the bereft brother romping with the children 
under the station-master's apple-trees. 

"I cannot express to you the sympathy I feel," 
said the clergyman, "with your grief under this 
great blow. Words on these occasions are of little 
avail. But I trust you know where to turn for true 
consolation." 

"Thank you, sir," replied Luke, who, though care- 
fully shaved and washed, still wore the light grey 
flannel suit of his Saturday's excursion. 

"Give Mr. Clavering an apple, Lizzie!" he added. 

"I wouldn't for a moment," continued the Reverend 
Hugh, "intrude upon you with any impertinent 
questions. But I could not help wondering as I 
walked through the village how this tragedy would 
affect you. I prayed it might," — here he laid a 
grave and pastoral hand on the young man's arm, — 
"I prayed it might give you a different attitude to 
those high matters which we have at various times 
discussed together. Am I right in my hope, Luke?" 

Never had the superb tactlessness of Nevilton's 
vicar betrayed him more deplorably. 

"Death is death, Mr. Clavering," replied the 
stone-carver, lifting up the youngest of the children 
and placing her astride on an apple-branch. "It's 
about the worst blow fate's ever dealt me. But when 



606 WOOD AND STONE 

it comes to any change in my ideas, — no ! I can't 
say that I've altered." 

"I understand you weren't with him when this 
terrible thing happened," said the clergyman. "They 
tell me he was picked up by strangers. There'll be 
no need, I trust, for an inquest, or anything of that 
kind?" 

Luke shook his head. "The doctor was up here 
last night. The thing's clear enough. His mind 
must have given way again. He's had those curst 
quarries on his nerves for a long while past. I wish 
to the devil — I beg your pardon, sir ! — I wish I'd 
taken him to Weymouth with me. I was a fool not 
to insist on that." 

"Yes, I heard you were away," remarked Hugh, 
with a certain caustic significance in his tone. "One 
or two of our young friends were with you, I believe?" 

Luke did not fail to miss the implication, and he hit 
back vindictively. 

"I understand you've had an interesting little ser- 
vice this morning, sir, or perhaps it's yet to come off? 
I can't help being a bit amused when I think of it!" 

An electric shock of anger thrilled through Cover- 
ing's frame. Controlling himself with a heroic effort, 
he repelled the malignant taunt. 

"I didn't know you concerned yourself with these 
observances, Andersen," he remarked. "But you're 
quite right. I've just this minute come from receiving 
Miss Romer into our church. Miss Traffio was with 
her. Both young ladies were greatly agitated over 
this unhappy occurrence. In fact it cast quite a 
gloom over what otherwise is one of the most beauti- 
ful incidents of all, in our ancient ritual." 



AVE ATQUE VALE 607 

Luke swung the little girl on the bough backwards 
and forwards. The other children, retired to a 
discreet distance, stared at the colloquy with wide- 
open eyes. 

"This baptizing of adults," continued Luke, — 
"you call 'em adults, don't you, on these occasions? — 
is really a little funny, isn't it?" 

"Funny!" roared the angry priest. "No, sir, it 
isn't funny! The saving of an immortal soul by 
God's most sacred sacrament may not appeal to you 
infidels as an essential ceremony, — but only a thor- 
oughly vulgar and philistine mind could call it 
funny!" 

"I'm afraid we shall never agree on these topics, 
Mr. Clavering," replied Luke calmly. "But it was 
most kind of you to come up and see me. I really 
appreciate it. Would it be possible," — his voice 
took a lower and graver tone, — "for my brother's 
funeral to be performed on Wednesday? I should be 
very grateful to you, sir, if that could be arranged." 

The young vicar frowned and looked slightly 
disconcerted. "What time would you wish it to be, 
Andersen?" he enquired. "I ask you this, because 
Wednesday is — er — unfortunately — the date fixed 
for another of these ceremonies that you scoff at. 
The Lord Bishop comes to Nevilton then. It is his 
own wish. I should myself have preferred a later 
date." 

"Ha! the confirmation!" ejaculated Luke, with a 
bitter little laugh. "You're certainly bent on striking 
while the iron's hot, Mr. Clavering. May I ask what 
hour has been fixed for this beautiful ceremony?" 

"Eleven o'clock in the morning," replied the priest, 



608 WOOD AND STONE 

ignoring with a dignified wave of his hand the stone- 
carver's jeering taunt. 

"Well then — if that suits you — and does not 
interfere with the Lord Bishop — " said Luke, "I 
should be most grateful if you could make the hour 
for James' funeral, ten o'clock in the morning? That 
service I happen to be more familiar with than the 
others, — and I know it doesn't take very long." 

Mr. Clavering bent his head in assent. 

"It shall certainly be as you wish," he said. "If 
unforeseen difficulties arise, I will let you know. But 
I have no doubt it can be managed. 

"I am right in assuming," he added, a little un- 
easily, "that your brother was a baptized member of 
our church?" 

Luke lifted the child from the bough and made her 
run off to play with the others. The glance he then 
turned upon the vicar of Nevilton was not one of 
admiration. 

"James was the noblest spirit I've ever known," 
he said sternly. "If there is such a thing as another 
world, he is certain to reach it — church or no 
church. As a matter of fact, if it is at all important 
to you, he was baptized in Nevilton. You'll find his 
name in the register — and mine too!" he added with 
a laugh. 

Mr. Clavering kept silence, and moved towards the 
gate. Luke followed him, and at the gate they shook 
hands. Perhaps the same thought passed through 
the minds of both of them, as they went through this 
ceremony; for a very queer look, almost identical in 
its expression on either face, was exchanged between 
them. 



AVE ATQUE VALE 609 

Before the morning was over Luke had a second 
visit of condolence. This was from Mr. Quincunx, 
and never had the quaint recluse been more warmly 
received. Luke was conscious at once that here was 
a man who could enter into every one of his feelings, 
and be neither horrified nor scandalized by the most 
fantastic inconsistency. 

The two friends walked up and down the sunny 
field in front of the house, Luke pouring into the 
solitary's attentive ears every one of his recent im- 
pressions and sensations. 

Mr. Quincunx was evidently profoundly moved by 
James' death. He refused Luke's offer to let him 
visit the room upstairs, but his refusal was expressed 
in such a natural and characteristic manner that the 
stone-carver accepted it in perfect good part. 

After a while they sat down together under the 
shady hedge at the top of the meadow. Here they 
discoursed and philosophized at large, listening to the 
sound of the church-bells and watching the slow- 
moving cattle. It was one of those unruffled Sunday 
mornings, when, in such places as this, the drowsiness 
of the sun-warmed leaves and grasses seems endowed 
with a kind of consecrated calm, the movements of 
the horses and oxen grow solemn and ritualistic, the 
languor of the heavy-winged butterflies appears holy, 
and the stiff sabbatical dresses of the men and women 
who shuffle so demurely to and fro, seem part of a 
patient liturgical observance. 

Luke loved Mr. Quincunx that morning. The 
recluse was indeed precisely in his element. Living 
habitually himself in thoughts of death, pleased — 
in that incomparable sunshine — to find himself still 



610 WOOD AND STONE 

alive, cynical and yet considerate, mystical and yet 
humorous, he exactly supplied what the wounded 
heart of the pagan mourner required for its comfort. 
"Idiots! asses! fools!" the stone-carver ejaculated, 
apostrophizing in his inmost spirit the various persons, 
clever or otherwise, to whom this nervous and eccen- 
tric creature was a mere type of failure and super- 
annuation. None of these others, — not one of them, 

— not Romer nor Dangelis nor Clavering nor Taxater 

— could for a moment have entered into the peculiar 
feelings which oppressed him. As for Gladys or 
Phyllis or Annie or Polly, — he would have as soon 
thought of relating his emotions to a row of swallows 
upon a telegraph-wire as to any of those dainty 
epitomes of life's evasiveness! 

A man's brain, a man's imagination, a man's 
scepticism, was what he wanted; but he wanted it 
touched with just that flavour of fanciful sentiment of 
which the Nevilton hermit was a master. A hundred 
quaint little episodes, the import of which none but 
Mr. Quincunx could have appreciated, were evoked 
by the stone-carver. Nothing was too blasphemous, 
nothing too outrageous, nothing too bizarre, for the 
solitary's taste. On the other hand, he entered with 
tender and perfect clairvoyance into the sick misery 
of loss which remained the background of all Luke's 
sensations. 

The younger man's impetuous confidences ebbed 
and dwindled at last; and with the silence of the 
church-bells and the receding to the opposite corner 
of the field of the browsing cattle, a deep and melan- 
choly hush settled upon them both. 

Then it was that Mr. Quincunx began speaking of 



AVE ATQUE VALE 611 

himself and his own anxieties. In the tension of the 
moment he even went so far as to disclose to Luke, 
under a promise of absolute secrecy, the sinister story 
of that contract into which Lacrima had entered with 
their employer. 

Luke was all attention at once. This was indeed a 
piece of astounding news! He couldn't have said 
whether he wondered more at the quixotic devotion 
of Lacrima for this quaint person, or at the solitary's 
unprecedented candour in putting him "en rapport" 
with such an amazing situation. 

"Of course we know," murmured Mr. Quincunx, 
in his deep subterranean voice, "that she wouldn't 
have promised such a thing, unless in her heart she 
had been keen, at all costs, to escape from those 
people. It isn't human nature to give up everything 
for nothing. Probably, as a matter of fact, she 
rather likes the idea of having a house of her own. 
I expect she thinks she could twist that fool Goring 
round her finger; and I daresay she could! But the 
thing is, what do you advise me to do? Of course I'm 
glad enough to agree to anything that saves me from 
this damnable office. But what worries me about it 
is that devil Romer put it into her head. I don't 
trust him, Luke; I don't trust him!" 

"I should think you don't!" exclaimed his com- 
panion, looking with astonishment and wonder into 
the solemn grey eyes fixed sorrowfully and intently 
upon his own. What a strange thing, he thought to 
himself, that this subtle-minded intelligence should be 
so hopelessly devoid of the least push of practical 
impetus. 

"Of course," Mr. Quincunx continued, "neither 



612 WOOD AND STONE 

you nor I would fuss ourselves much over the idea of a 
girl being married to a fool like this, if there weren't 
something different from the rest about her. This 
nonsense about their having to 'love,' as the little 
simpletons call it, the man they agree to live with, is 
of course all tommy-rot. No one 'loves' the person 
they live with. She wouldn't love me, — she'd 
probably hate me like poison, — after the first week 
or so! The romantic idiots who make so much of 
'love,' and are so horrified when these little creatures 
are married without it, don't understand what this 
planet is made of. They don't understand the feel- 
ings of the girls either. 

" I tell you a girl likes being made a victim of in this 
particular kind of way. They're much less fastidious, 
when it comes to the point, than we are. As a matter 
of fact what does trouble them is being married to a 
man they really have a passion for. Then, jealousy 
bites through their soft flesh like Cleopatra's serpent, 
and all sorts of wild ideas get into their heads. It's 
not natural, Luke, it's not natural, for girls to marry 
a person they love! That's why we country dogs 
treat the whole thing as a lewd jest. 

"Do you think these honest couples who stand 
giggling and smirking before our dear clergyman every 
quarter, don't hate one another in their hearts? Of 
course they do; it wouldn't be nature if they didn't! 
But that doesn't say they don't get their pleasure 
out of it. And Lacrima'll get her pleasure, in some 
mad roundabout fashion, from marrying Goring, — 
you may take my word for that!" 

"It seems to me," remarked Luke slowly, "that 
you're trying all this time to quiet your conscience. 



AVE ATQUE VALE 613 

I believe you've really got far more conscience, 
Maurice, than I have. It's your conscience that 
makes you speak so loud, at this very moment!" 

Mr. Quincunx got up on his feet and stroked his 
beard. "I'm afraid I've annoyed you somehow," he 
remarked. "No person ever speaks of another per- 
son's conscience unless he's in a rage with him." 

The stone-carver stretched out his legs and lit a 
cigarette. "Sit down again, you old fool," he said, 
"and let's talk this business over sensibly." 

The recluse sighed deeply, and, subsiding into his 
former position, fixed a look of hopeless melancholy 
upon the sunlit landscape. 

"The point is this, Maurice," began the young 
man. "The first thing in these complicated situations 
is to be absolutely certain what one wants oneself. 
It seems to me that a good deal of your agitation 
comes from the fact that you haven't made up your 
mind what you want. You asked my advice, you 
know, so you won't be angry if I'm quite plain with 
you?" 

"Go on," said Mr. Quincunx, a remote flicker of 
his goblin-smile twitching his nostrils, "I see I'm in 
for a few little hits." 

Luke waved his hand. "No hits, my friend, no 
hits. All I want to do, is to find out from you what 
you really feel. One philosophizes, naturally, about 
girls marrying, and so on; but the point is, — do you 
want this particular young lady for yourself, or don't 

you?" 

Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard. "Well," — he 
said meditatively, "if it comes to that, I suppose I do 
want her. We're all fools in some way or other, I 



614 WOOD AND STONE 

fancy. Yes, I do want her, Luke, and that's the 
honest truth. But I don't want to have to work 
twice as hard as I'm doing now, and under still more 
unpleasant conditions, to keep her!" 

Luke emitted a puff of smoke and knocked the 
ashes from his cigarette upon the purple head of a 
tall knapweed. 

"Ah!" he ejaculated. "Now we've got something 
to go upon." 

Mr. Quincunx surveyed the faun-like profile of 
his friend with some apprehension. He mentally 
resolved that nothing, — nothing in heaven nor 
earth, — should put him to the agitation of making 
any drastic change in his life. 

"We get back then," continued Luke, "to the 
point we reached on our walk to Seven Ashes." 

As he said the words "Seven Ashes" the ice-cold 
finger of memory pierced him with that sudden stab 
which is like a physical blow. What did it matter, 
after all, he thought, what happened to any of these 
people, now Daddy James was dead? 

"You remember," he went on, while the sorrowful 
grey eyes of his companion regarded him with wistful 
anxiety, "you told me, in that walk, that if some 
imaginary person were to leave you money enough 
to live comfortably, you would marry Lacrima with- 
out any hesitation?" 

Mr. Quincunx nodded. 

"Well," — Luke continued — "in return for your 
confession about that contract, I'll confess to you 
that Mr. Taxater and I formed a plan together, when 
my brother first got ill, to secure you this money." 

Mr. Quincunx made a grimace of astonishment. 



AVE ATQUE VALE 615 

"The plan has lapsed now," went on Luke, "owing 
to Mr. Taxater's being away; but I can't help feeling 
that something of that kind might be done. I feel 
in a queer sort of fashion," he added, "though I can't 
quite tell you why, that, after all, things'll so work 
themselves out, that you will get both the girl and 
the money!" 

Mr. Quincunx burst into a fit of hilarious merri- 
ment, and rubbed his hands together. But a moment 
later his face clouded. 

"It's impossible," he murmured with a deep sigh; 
"it's impossible, Luke. Girls and gold go together 
like butterflies and sunshine. I'm as far from either, 
as the sea- weed under the arch of Weymouth Bridge." 

Luke pondered for a moment in silence. 

"It's an absurd superstition," he finally remarked, 
"but I can't help a sort of feeling that James' spirit 
is actively exerting itself on your side. He was 
a romantic old truepenny, and his last thoughts were 
all fixed — of that I'm sure — upon Lacrima's 
escaping this marriage with Goring." 

Mr. Quincunx sighed. He had vaguely imagined 
the possibility of some grand diplomatic stroke on his 
behalf, from the astute Luke; and this relapse into 
mysticism, on the part of that sworn materialist, did 
not strike him as reassuring. 

The silence that fell between them was broken by 
the sudden appearance of a figure familiar to them 
both, crossing the field towards them. It was Witch- 
Bessie, who, in a bright new shawl, and with a mys- 
terious packet clutched in her hand, was beckoning to 
attract their attention. The men rose and advanced 
to meet her. 



616 WOOD AND STONE 

"I'll sit down a bit with 'ee," cried the old woman, 
waving to them to return to their former posi- 
tion. 

When they were seated once more beneath the 
bank, — the old lady, like some strange Peruvian 
idol, resting cross-legged at their feet, — she began, 
without further delay, to explain the cause of her 
visit. 

"I know'd how 'twould be with 'ee," she said, 
addressing Luke, but turning a not unfriendly eye 
upon his companion. "I did know well how 'twould 
be. I hear'd tell of brother's being laid out, from 
Bert Leerd, as I traipsed through Wild Pine this 
morning. 

"Ninsy Lintot was a-cryin' enough to break her 
poor heart. I hear'd 'un as I doddered down yon 
lane. She were all lonesome-like, under them girt 
trees, shakin' and sobbin' terrible. She took on so, 
when I arst what ailed 'un, that I dursn't lay finger 
on the lass. 

"She did right down scare I, Master Luke, and 
that's God's holy truth! 'Let me bide, Bessie,' says 
she, 'let me bide.' I telled her 'twas a sin to He 
she loved best, to carry on so hopeless; and with that 
she up and says, — 'I be the cause of it all, Bessie,' 
says she, 'I be the cause he throw'd 'isself away.' 
And with that she set herself cryin' again, like as 
'twas pitiful to hear. 'My darlin', my darlin',' she 
kept callin' out. 'I love no soul 'cept thee — no 
soul 'cept thee!' 

" 'Twas then I recollected wot my old Mother used 
to say, 'bout maids who be cryin' like pantin' hares. 
'Listen to me, Ninsy Lintot,' I says, solemn and slow, 



AVE ATQUE VALE 617 

like as us were in church. 'One above's been talk- 
ing wi' I, this blessed morn, and He do say as Master 
James be in Abram's Bosom, with them shining ones, 
and it be shame and sin for mortals like we to wish 
'un back.' 

"That quieted the lass a bit, and I did tell she 
then, wot be God's truth, that 'tweren't her at all 
turned brother's head, but the pleasure .of the 
Almighty. "Tis for folks like us,' I says to her, 'to 
take wot His will do send, and bide quiet and still, 
same as cows, drove to barton.' 

" 'Twere a blessing of providence I'd met crazy 
Bert afore I seed the lass, else I'd a been struck dazed- 
like by wot she did tell. But as 'twas, thanks be 
to recollectin' mother's trick wi' such wendy maids, 
I dried her poor eyes and got her back home along. 
And she gave I summat to put in brother's coffin 
afore they do nail 'un down." 

Before either Luke or Mr. Quincunx had time to 
utter any comment upon this narration, Witch-Bessie 
unfastened the packet she was carrying, and pro- 
duced from a cardboard box a large roughly-moulded 
bracelet, or bangle, of heavy silver, such as may be 
bought in the bazaars of Tunis or Algiers. 

"There," cried the old woman, holding the thing 
up, and flashing it in the sun, "that's wot she gave 
I, to bury long wi' brother! Be pretty enough, 
baint 'un? Though, may-be, not fittin' for a quiet 
home-keeping lass like she. She had 'un off some 
Gipoo, she said; and to my thinkin' it be a kind of 
heathen ornimint, same as folks do buy at Rogertown 
Fair. But such as 'tis, that be wot 'tis bestowed 
for, to put i' the earth long wi' brother. Seems 



618 WOOD AND STONE 

somethin' of a pity, may-be, but maid's whimsies be 
maids' whimsies, and God Almighty'll plague the 
hard-hearted folk as won't perform wot they do cry 
out for." 

Luke took the bangle from the old woman's 
hand. 

"Of course I'll do what she wants, Bessie," he said. 
"Poor little Ninsy, I never knew how much she 
cared." 

He permitted Mr. Quincunx to handle the sil- 
ver object, and then carefully placed it in his 
pocket. 

"Hullo!" he cried, "what else have you got, 
Bessie?" This exclamation was caused by the fact 
that Witch-Bessie, after fumbling in her shawl had 
produced a second mysterious packet, smaller than 
the first and tightly tied round with the stalks of some 
sort of hedge-weed. 

"Cards, by Heaven!" exclaimed Luke. "Oh Bessie, 
Bessie," he added, "why didn't you bring these 
round here twenty-four hours ago? You might have 
made me take him with me to Weymouth!" 

Untying the packet, which contained as the stone- 
carver had anticipated, a pack of incredibly dirty 
cards, the old woman without a word to either of 
them, shuffled and sifted them, according to some 
secret rule, and laid aside all but nine. These, al- 
most, but not entirely, consisting of court cards, 
she spread out in a carefully concerted manner on 
the grass at her feet. 

Muttering over them some extraordinary gibberish, 
out of which the two men could only catch the 
following words, 



AVE ATQUE VALE 619 

"Higgory, diggory, digg'd 
My sow has pigg'd. 
There's a good card for thee. 
There's a still better than he! 
There is the best of all three, 
And there is Niddy-noddee! " — 

Witch-Bessie picked up these nine cards, and shuffled 
them long and fast. 

She then handed them to Luke, face-downward, and 
bade him draw seven out of the nine. These she once 
more arranged, according to some occult plan, upon 
the grass, and pondered over them with wrinkled brow. 

" 'Tis as 'twould be!" she muttered at last. "Cards 
be wonderful crafty, though toads and efties, to my 
thinkin', be better, and a viper's 'innards be God's 
very truth." 

Making, to Luke's great disappointment, no further 
allusion to the result of her investigations, the old 
woman picked up the cards and went through the 
whole process again, in honour of Mr. Quincunx. 

This time, after bending for several minutes over 
the solitary's choice, she became more voluble. 

"Thy heart's wish be thine, dearie," she said. 
"But there be thwartings and blastings. Three 
tears — three kisses — and a terrible journey. Us 
shan't have 'ee long wi' we, in these 'ere parts. Thee 
be marked and signed, master, by fallin' stars and 
flyin' birds. There's good sound wood gone to ship's 
keel wot'll carry thee fast and far. Blastings and 
thwartings! But thy heart's wish be thine, dearie." 

The humourous nostrils of Mr. Quincunx and the 
expressive curves of his bearded chin had twitched 
and quivered as this sorcery began, but the old 



620 WOOD AND STONE 

woman's reference to a "terrible journey" clouded 
his countenance with blank dismay. 

Luke pressed the sybil to be equally communicative 
with regard to his own fate, but the old woman gath- 
ered up her cards, twisted the same faded stalks 
round the packet, and returned it to the folds of 
her shawl. Then she struggled up upon her feet. 

"Don't leave us yet, Bessie," said Luke. "I'll 
bring you out something to eat presently." 

Witch-Bessie's only reply to this hospitable invi- 
tation was confounding in its irrelevance. She 
picked up her draggled skirt with her two hands, dis- 
playing her unlaced boots and rumpled stockings, 
and then, throwing back her wizened head, with its 
rusty weather-bleached bonnet, and emitting a pallid 
laugh from her toothless gums, she proceeded to 
tread a sort of jerky measure, moving her old feet 
to the tune of a shrill ditty. 

"Now we dance looby, looby, looby, 
Now we dance looby, looby, light; 
Shake your right hand a little, 
Shake your left hand a little, 
And turn you round about." 

"Ye'll both see I again, present," she panted, when 
this performance was over, "but bide where 'ee be, 
bide where 'ee be now. Old Bessie's said her say, 
and she be due long of Hullaway Cross, come noon." 

As she hobbled off to the neighbouring stile, Luke 
saw her kiss the tips of her fingers in the direction 
of the station-master's house. 

"She's bidding Daddy James good-bye," he 
thought. "What a world! 'Looby, looby, looby!' 
A proper Dance of Death for a son of my mother!" 



CHAPTER XXIV 
THE GRANARY 

LUKE persuaded Mr. Quincunx to stay with 
him for the station-master's Sunday dinner, 
and to stroll with him down to the churchyard 
in the afternoon to decide, in consultation with the 
sexton, upon the most suitable spot for his brother's 
interment. The stone-carver was resolved that this 
spot should be removed as far as possible from the 
grave of their parents, and the impiety of this reso- 
lution was justified by the fact that Gideon's tomb 
was crowded on both sides by less aggressive sleepers. 

They finally selected a remote place under the 
southern wall, at the point where the long shadow 
of the tower, in the late afternoon, flung its clear- 
outlined battlements on the waving grass. 

Luke continued to be entirely pleased with Mr. 
Quincunx's tact and sympathy. He felt he could 
not have secured a better companion for this task 
of selecting the final resting-place of the brother of 
his soul. "Curse these fools," he thought, "who rail 
against this excellent man!" What mattered it, 
after all, that the fellow hated what the world calls 
"work," and loved a peaceful life removed from 
distraction? 

The noble attributes of humour, of imagination, 
of intelligence, — how much more important they were, 
and conducive to the general human happiness, than 



622 WOOD AND STONE 

the mere power of making money! Compared with 
the delicious twists and diverting convolutions in 
Mr. Quincunx's extraordinary brain, how dull, how 
insipid, seemed such worldly cleverness! 

The death of his brother had had the effect of 
throwing these things into a new perspective. The 
Machiavellian astuteness, which, in himself, in Romer, 
in Mr. Taxater, and in many others, he had, until 
now, regarded as of supreme value in the conduct 
of life, seemed to him, as he regretfully bade the 
recluse farewell and retraced his steps, far less es- 
sential, far less important, than this imaginative sensi- 
tiveness to the astounding spectacle of the world. 

He fancied he discerned in front of him, as he 
left the churchyard, the well-known figure of his newly 
affianced Annie, and he made a detour through the 
lane, to avoid her. He felt at that moment as 
though nothing in the universe were interesting or 
important except the sympathetic conversation of the 
friends of one's natural choice — persons of that 
small, that fatally small circle, from which just now 
the centre seemed to have dropped out! 

Girls were a distraction, a pastime, a lure, an 
intoxication; but a shock like this, casting one back 
upon life's essential verities, threw even lust itself 
into the limbo of irrelevant things. All his recent 
preoccupation with the love of women seemed to 
him now, as though, in place of dreaming over the 
mystery of the great tide of life, hand in hand with 
initiated comrades, he were called upon to go launch- 
ing little paper-boats on its surface, full of fretful 
anxiety as to whether they sank or floated. 

Weighed down by the hopeless misery of his loss, 



THE GRANARY 623 

he made his way slowly back to the station-master's 
house, too absorbed in his grief to speak to any- 
one. 

After tea he became so wretched and lonely, that 
he decided to walk over to Hullaway on the chance 
of getting another glimpse of Witch-Bessie. Even 
the sympathy of the station-master's wife got on his 
nerves and the romping of the children fretted and 
chafed him. 

He walked fast, swinging his stick and keeping his 
eyes on the ground, his heart empty and desolate. 
He followed the very path by which Gladys and he, 
some few short weeks before, had returned in the 
track of their two friends, from the Hullaway stocks. 

Arriving at the village green, with its pond, its 
elms, its raised pavement, and its groups of Sunday 
loiterers, he turned into the churchyard. As we have 
noted many times ere now, the appealing silence of 
these places of the dead had an invincible charm for 
him. It was perhaps a morbid tendency inherited 
from his mother, or, on the other hand, it may have 
been a pure aesthetic whim of his own, that led him, 
with so magnetic an attraction, towards these oases 
of mute patience, in the midst of the diurnal activi- 
ties; but whatever the spell was, Luke had never 
found more relief in obeying it than he did at this 
present hour. 

He sat down in their favourite corner and looked 
with interest at the various newly-blown wild-flowers, 
which a few weeks' lapse had brought to light. How 
well he loved the pungent stringy stalks, the grey 
leaves, the flat sturdy flowers of the "achillea" or 
"yarrow " ! Perhaps, above all the late summer blooms, 



624 WOOD AND STONE 

he preferred these — finding, in their very coarseness 
of texture and toughness of stem, something that 
reassured and fortified. They were so bitter in their 
herbal fragrance, so astringent in the tang of their 
pungent taste, that they suggested to him the kind 
of tonic cynicism, the sort of humorous courage and 
gay disdain, with which it was his constant hope to 
come at last to accept life. 

It pleased him, above all when he found these 
plants tinged with a delicious pink, as though the 
juice of raspberries had been squeezed over them, 
and it was precisely this tint he noticed now in a 
large clump of them, growing on the sun-warmed 
grave of a certain Hugh and Constance Foley, 
former occupants of the old Manor House behind 
him. 

He wondered if this long-buried Hugh — a mysteri- 
ous and shadowy figure, about whom James and he 
had often woven fantastic histories — had felt as 
forlorn as he felt now, when he lost his Constance. 
Could a Constance, or an Annie, or a Phyllis, ever 
leave quite the void behind them such as now ached 
and throbbed within him? Yes, he supposed so. 
Men planted their heart's loves in many various 
soils, and when the hand of fate tugged them away, 
it mattered little whether it was chalk, or sand, or 
loam, that clung about the roots! 

He looked long and long at the sunlit mounds, 
over which the tombstones leaned at every conceivable 
angle and upon which some had actually fallen pros- 
trate. These neglected monuments, and these tall 
uncut grasses and flowers, had always seemed to 
him preferable to the trim neatness of an enclosure 



THE GRANARY 625 

like that of Athelston, which resembled the lawn of 
a gentleman's house. 

James had often disputed with him on this point, 
arguing, in a spirit of surly contradiction, in favour 
of the wondrous effect of those red Athelston roses 
hanging over clear-mown turf. The diverse sugges- 
tiveness of graveyards was one of the brother's best- 
loved topics, and innumerable cigarettes had they 
both consumed, weighing this subject, on this very 
spot. 

Once more the hideous finality of the thing pierced 
the heart of Luke with a devastating pang. On Wed- 
nesday next, — that is, after the lapse of two brief 
days, — he would bid farewell, for ever and ever and 
ever, to the human companion with whom he had 
shared all he cared for in life! 

He remembered a little quarrel he once had with 
James, long ago, in this very place, and how it had 
been the elder and not the younger who had made 
the first overtures of reconciliation, and how James 
had given him an old pair of silver links, — he was 
wearing them at that moment ! — as a kind of peace- 
offering. He recollected what a happy evening they 
had spent together after that event, and how they 
had read "Thus spake Zarathustra" in the old formi- 
dable English translation — the mere largeness of the 
volume answering to the largeness of the philosopher's 
thought. 

Never again would they two "take on them," in 
the sweet Shakespearean phrase, "the mystery of 
things, as though they were God's spies." 

Luke set himself to recall, one by one, innumerable 
little incidents of their life together. He remembered 



626 WOOD AND STONE 

various occasions in which, partly out of pure contrari- 
ness, but partly also out of a certain instinctive bias 
in his blood, he had defended their father against 
his brother's attacks. He recalled one strange con- 
versation they had had, under the withy-stumps of 
Badger's Bottom, as they returned through the dusk 
of a November day, from a long walk over the 
southern hills. It had to do with the appearance of 
a cloud-swept crescent moon above the Auber woods. 

James had maintained that were he a pagan of 
the extinct polytheistic faith, he would have wor- 
shipped the moon, and willingly offered her, night 
by night, — he used the pious syllables of the great 
hedonist, — her glittering wax tapers upon the sacred 
wheaten cake. Luke, on the contrary, had sworn 
that the sun, and no lesser power, was the god of 
his idolatry, and he imagined himself in place of his 
brother's wax candles, pouring forth, morning by 
morning, a rich libation of gold wine to that bright 
lord of life. 

This instinctive division of taste between the two, 
had led, over and over again, to all manner of friendly 
dissension. 

Luke recalled how often he had rallied James upon 
his habit of drifting into what the younger brother 
pertinently described as a "translunar mood." He 
was "translunar" enough now, at any rate; but now 
it was in honour of that other "lady of the night," 
of that dreadful " double " of his moon-goddess — 
the dark pomegranate-bearer — that the candles must 
be lit! 

Luke revived in his mind, as he watched the slow- 
shifting shadows move from grave to grave, all those 



THE GRANARY 627 

indescribable "little things" of their every-day life 
together, the loss of which seemed perhaps worst 
of all. He recalled how on gusty December evenings 
they would plod homeward from some Saturday 
afternoon's excursion to Yeoborough, and how the 
cheerful firelight from the station-master's house 
would greet them as they crossed the railway. 

So closely had their thoughts and sensations grown 
together, that there were many little poignant mem- 
ories, out of the woven texture of which he found 
himself quite unable to disentangle the imaginative 
threads that were due to his brother, from such as 
were the evocation of his own temperament. 

One such concentrated moment, of exquisite mem- 
ory, he associated with an old farm-house on the 
edge of the road leading from Hullaway to Rogers- 
town. This road, — a forlorn enough highway of 
Roman origin, dividing a level plain of desolate rain- 
flooded meadows, — was one of their favourite haunts. 
"Halfway House," as the farm-dwelling was called, 
especially appealed to them, because of its romantic 
and melancholy isolation. 

Luke remembered how he had paused with his 
brother one clear frosty afternoon when the puddles 
by the road-side were criss-crossed by little broken 
stars of fresh-formed ice, and had imagined how they 
would feel if such a place belonged to them by heredi- 
tary birthright, what they would feel were they even 
now returning there, between the tall evergreens 
at the gate, to spend a long evening over a log fire, 
with mulled claret on the hob, and cards and books 
on the table, and a great white Persian cat, — this 
was James' interpolation ! — purring softly, and rub- 



628 WOOD AND STONE 

bing its silky sides against Chinese vases full of 
rose-leaves. 

Strange journeys his mind took, that long unfor- 
gettable afternoon, — the first of his life spent with- 
out his brother! He saw before him, at one moment, 
a little desolate wooden pier, broken by waves and 
weather, somewhere on the Weymouth coast. The in- 
describable pathos of things outworn and done with, 
of things abandoned by man and ill-used by nature, 
had given to this derelict pile of drift-wood a curious 
prominence in his House of Memory. He remembered 
the look with which James had regarded it, and how 
the wind had whistled through it and how they had 
tried in vain to light their cigarettes under its 
shelter. 

At another moment his mind swung back to the 
daily routine in their pleasant lodging. He recalled 
certain spring mornings when they had risen together 
at dawn and had crept stealthily out, for fear of waking 
their landlady. He vividly remembered the peculiar 
smell of moss and primroses with which the air seemed 
full on one of these occasions. 

The place Luke had chosen for summoning up all 
these ghosts of the past held him with such a spell 
that he permitted the church-bells to ring and the 
little congregation to assemble for the evening 
service without moving or stirring. "Hugh and 
Constance Foley " he kept repeating to himself, as the 
priest's voice, within the sacred building, intoned the 
prayers. The sentiment of the plaintive hymn with 
which the service closed, — he hardly moved or stirred 
for the brief hour of the liturgy's progress, — brought 
tears, the first he had shed since his brother's death, 



THE GRANARY 629 

to this wanton faun's eyes. What is there, he thought, 
in these wistful tunes, and impossible, too-sweet 
words, that must needs hit the most cynical of 
sceptics? 

He let the people shuffle out and drift away, and 
the grey-haired parson and his silk-gowned wife fol- 
low them and vanish, and still he did not stir. For 
some half-an-hour longer he remained in the same 
position, his chin upon his knees, staring gloomily 
in front of him. He was still seated so, when, to 
the eyes of an observer posted on the top of the 
tower, two persons, the first a woman and the sec- 
ond a man, would have been observed approaching, 
by a rarely-traversed field-path, the side of the en- 
closure most remote from Hullaway Green. 

The path upon which these figures advanced was 
interrupted at certain intervals by tall elm-trees, and 
it would have been clear to our imaginary watcher 
upon the tower that the second of the two was glad 
enough of the shelter of these trees, of which it was 
evident he intended to make use, did the first figure 
turn and glance backward. 

Had such a sentinel been possessed of local knowl- 
edge he would have had no difficulty in recognizing 
the first of these persons as Gladys Romer and the 
second as Mr. Clavering. 

Gladys had, in fact, gone alone to the evening 
service, on the ground of celebrating the close of her 
baptismal day. Immediately after the service she 
had slipped off down the street leading to the rail- 
road, directing her steps towards Hullaway, whither 
a sure instinct told her Luke had wandered. 

She was still in sight, having got no further than 



630 WOOD AND STONE 

the entrance to Splash Lane, when Clavering, who 
had changed his surplice with lightning rapidity, 
issued forth into the street. In a flash he remarked 
the direction of her steps, and impelled by an impulse 
of mad jealousy, began blindly following her. 

Not a few heads were inquisitively turned, and not 
a few whispering comments were exchanged, as first 
the squire's daughter, and then the young clergy- 
man, made their way through the street. 

As soon as Gladys had crossed the railroad and 
struck out at a sharp pace up the slope of the meadow 
Clavering realized that wherever she intended to go 
it was not to the house in which lay James Andersen. 
Torn with intolerable jealousy, and anxious, at all 
risks, to satisfy his mind, one way or the other, as 
to her relations with Luke, he deliberately decided to 
follow the girl to whatever hoped-for encounter, or 
carefully plotted assignation, she was now directing 
her steps. How true, how exactly true, to his inter- 
pretation of Luke's character, was this astutely ar- 
ranged meeting, on the very day after his brother's 
death ! 

At the top of the station-field Gladys paused for 
a moment, and, turning round, contemplated the 
little dwelling which was now a house of the dead. 

Luckily for Mr. Clavering, this movement of hers 
coincided with his arrival at the thick-set hedge sepa- 
rating the field from the metal track. He waited at 
the turn-stile until, her abstraction over, she passed 
into the lane. 

All the way to Hullaway Mr. Clavering followed 
her, hurriedly concealing himself when there seemed 
the least danger of discovery, and at certain critical 



THE GRANARY 631 

moments making slight deviations from the direct 
pursuit. 

As she drew near the churchyard the girl showed 
evident signs of nervousness and apprehension, 
walking more slowly, and looking about her, and some- 
times even pausing as if to take breath and collect 
her thoughts. 

It was fortunate for her pursuer at this final mo- 
ment of the chase that the row of colossal elms, of 
which mention has been made, interposed themselves 
between the two. Clavering was thus able to approach 
quite close to the girl before she reached her destina- 
tion, for, making use of these rugged trunks, as an 
Indian scout might have done, he was almost within 
touch of her by the time she clambered over the 
railings. 

The savage bite of insane jealousy drove from the 
poor priest's head any thought of how grotesque he 
must have appeared, — could any eyes but those of 
field-mice and starlings have observed him, — with his 
shiny black frock-coat and broad-brimmed hat, peep- 
ing and spying in the track of this fair young person. 

With a countenance convulsed with helpless fury 
he watched the girl walk slowly and timidly up to 
Luke's side, and saw the stone-carver recognize her 
and rise to greet her. He could not catch their 
words, though he strained his ears to do so, but their 
gestures and attitudes were quite distinguishable. 

It was, indeed, little wonder that the agitated 
priest could not overhear what Gladys said, for the 
extreme nervousness under which she laboured made 
her first utterances so broken and low that even 
her interlocutor could scarcely follow them. 



632 WOOD AND STONE 

She laid a pleading hand on Luke's arm. "I was 
unhappy," she murmured, "I was unhappy, and I 
wanted to tell you. I've been thinking about you all 
day. I heard of his death quite early in the morning. 
Luke, — you're not angry with me any more, are 
you? I'd have done anything that this shouldn't 
have happened!" 

Luke looked at her searchingly, but made, at the 
same time, an impatient movement of his arm, so 
that the hand she had placed upon his sleeve fell 
to her side. 

"Let's get away from here, Luke," she implored; 
"anywhere, — across the fields, — I told them at 
home I might go for a walk after church. It'll be 
all right. No one will know." 

"Across the fields — eh?" replied the stone-carver. 
"Well — I don't mind. What do you say to a walk 
to Rogerstown? I haven't been there since I went 
with James, and there'll be a moon to get home by." 
He looked at her intently, with a certain bitter hu- 
mour lurking in the curve of his lips. 

Under ordinary circumstances it was with the 
utmost difficulty that Gladys could be persuaded to 
walk anywhere. Her lethargic nature detested that 
kind of exercise. He was amazed at the alacrity with 
which she accepted the offer. 

Her eyes quite lit up. "I'd love that, Luke, I'd 
simply love it!" she cried eagerly. "Let's start! I'll 
walk as fast as you like — and I don't care how late 
we are!" 

They moved out of the churchyard together, by the 
gate opening on the green. 

Luke was interested, but not in the least touched, 



THE GRANARY 633 

by the girl's chastened and submissive manner. His 
suggestion about Rogerstown was really more of a 
sort of test than anything else, to see just how far 
this clinging passivity of hers would really go. 

As they followed the lane leading out of one of the 
side-alleys of the village towards the Roman Road, 
the stone-carver could not help indulging in a certain 
amount of silent psychological analysis in regard to 
this change of heart in his fair mistress. He seemed 
to get a vision of the great world-passions, sweeping 
at random through the universe, and bending the 
most obsinate wills to their caprice. 

On the one hand, he thought, there is that absurd 
Mr. Clavering, — simple, pure-minded, a veritable 
monk of God, — driven almost insane with Desire, 
and on the other, here is Gladys, — naturally as 
selfish and frivolous a young pagan as one could 
wish to amuse oneself with, — driven almost insane 
with self-oblivious love! They were like earthquakes 
and avalanches, like whirlpools and water-spouts, 
he thought, these great world-passions! They could 
overwhelm all the good in one person, and all the 
evil in another, with the same sublime indifference, 
and in themselves — remain non-moral, superhuman, 
elemental ! 

In the light of this vision, Luke could not resist a 
hurried mental survey of the various figures in his 
personal drama. He wondered how far his own love 
for James could be said to belong to this formidable 
category. No! He supposed that both he and Mr. 
Quincunx were too self-possessed, or too epicurean, 
ever to be thus swept out of their path. His brother 
was clearly a victim of these erotic Valkyries, so was 



634 WOOD AND STONE 

Ninsy Lintot, and in a lesser degree, he shrewdly 
surmised, young Philip Wone. He himself, he sup- 
posed, was, in these things, amourous and vicious 
rather than passionate. So he had always imagined 
Gladys to have been. But Gladys had been as com- 
pletely swept out of the shallows of her viciousness, 
by this overpowering obsession, as Mr. Clavering 
had been swept out of the shallows of his puritanism, 
by the same power. If that fantastic theory of Vennie 
Seldom's about the age-long struggle between the two 
Hills — between the stone of the one and the wood of 
the other — had any germ of truth in it, it was clear 
that these elemental passions belonged to a region 
of activity remote from either, and as indifferent to 
both, as the great zodiacal signs were indifferent to 
the solar planets. 

Luke had just arrived at this philosophical, or, if 
the reader pleases, mystical conclusion, when they 
emerged upon the Roman Road. 

Ascending an abrupt hill, the last eminence between 
Hullaway and far-distant ranges, they found them- 
selves looking down over an immense melancholy 
plain, in the centre of which, on the banks of a muddy 
river, stood the ancient Roman stronghold of Rogers- 
town, the birth-place, so Luke always loved to re- 
mind himself, of the famous monkish scientist Roger 
Bacon. 

The sun had already disappeared, and the dark line 
of the Mendip Hills on the northern horizon were 
wrapped in a thick, purple haze. 

The plain they looked down upon was cut into two 
equal segments by the straight white road they were 
to follow, — if Luke was serious in his intention, — 



THE GRANARY 635 

and all along the edges of the road, and spreading in 
transverse lines across the level fields, were deep, 
reedy ditches, bordered in places by pollard wil- 
lows. 

The whole plain, subject, in autumn and winter, 
to devastating floods, was really a sort of inlet or 
estuary of the great Somersetshire marshes, lying 
further west, which are collectively known as 
Sedgemoor. 

Gladys could not refrain from giving vent to a 
slight movement of instinctive reluctance, when she 
saw how close the night was upon them, and how long 
the road seemed, but she submissively suppressed any 
word of protest, when, with a silent touch upon 
her arm, her companion led her forward, down the 
shadowy incline. 

Their figures were still visible — two dark isolated 
forms upon the pale roadway — when, hot and panting, 
Mr. Clavering arrived at the same hill-top. With a 
sigh of profound relief he recognized that he had not 
lost his fugitives. The only question was, where 
were they going, and for what purpose? He remained 
for several minutes gloomy and watchful at his post 
of observation. 

They were now nearly half a mile across the plain, 
and their receding figures had already begun to grow 
indistinct in the twilight, when Mr. Clavering saw 
them suddenly leave the road and debouch to the 
left. "Ah!" he muttered to himself, "They're going 
home by Hullaway Chase!" 

This Hullaway Chase was a rough tract of pastur- 
age a little to the east of the level flats, and raised 
slightly above them. From its southern extremity a 



636 WOOD AND STONE 

long narrow lane, skirting the outlying cottages of 
the village, led straight across the intervening uplands 
to Nevilton Park. It was clearly towards this lane, 
by a not much frequented foot-path over the ditches, 
that Gladys and Luke were proceeding. 

To anyone as well acquainted as Clavering was 
with the general outline of the country the route that 
the lovers — or whatever their curious relation 
justifies us in calling them — must needs take, to 
return to Nevilton, was now as clearly marked as 
if it were indicated on a map. 

"Curse him!" muttered the priest, "I hope he's 
not going to drown her in those brooks!" 

He let his gaze wander across the level expanse at 
his feet. How could he get close to them, he won- 
dered, so as to catch even a stray sentence or two of 
what they were saying. 

His passion had reached such a point of insanity 
that he longed to be transformed into one of those 
dark-winged rooks that now in a thin melancholy line 
were flying over their heads, so that he might swoop 
down above them and follow them — follow them — 
every step of the way! He was like a man drawn to 
the edge of a precipice and magnetized by the very 
danger of the abyss. To be near them, to listen to 
what they said, — the craving for that possessed him 
with a fixed and obstinate hunger! 

Suddenly he shook his cane in the air and almost 
leaped for joy. He remembered the existence, at 
the spot where the lane they were seeking began, of 
a large dilapidated barn, used, by the yeoman-farmer 
to whom the Chase belonged, as a rough store-house 
for cattle-food. The spot was so attractive a resting- 



THE GRANARY 637 

place for persons tired with walking, that it seemed 
as though it would be a strange chance indeed if the 
two wanderers did not take advantage of it. The 
point was, could be forestall them and arrive there 
first? 

He surveyed the landscape around him with an 
anxious eye. It seemed as though by following the 
ridge of the hill upon which he stood, and crossing 
every obstacle that intervened, he ought to be able 
to do so — and to do so without losing sight of the 
two companions, as they unsuspiciously threaded their 
way over the flats. 

Having made his resolution, he lost no time in 
putting it into action. He clambered without diffi- 
culty into the meadow on his right, and breaking, 
in his excitement, into a run, he forced his way 
through three successive bramble-hedges, and as 
many dew-drenched turnip-fields, without the least 
regard to the effect of this procedure upon his Sunday 
attire. 

Every now and then, as the contours of the ground 
served, he caught a glimpse of the figures in the valley 
below, and the sight hastened the impetuosity of his 
speed. Once he felt sure he observed them pause 
and exchange an embrace, but this may have been 
an illusive mirage created by the mad fumes of the 
tempestuous jealousy which kept mounting higher 
and higher into his head. Recklessly and blindly he 
rushed on, performing feats of agility and endurance, 
such as in normal hours would have been utterly 
impossible. 

From the moment he decided upon this desperate 
undertaking, to the moment, when, hot, breathless, 



638 WOOD AND STONE 

and dishevelled, he reached his destination, only a 
brief quarter of an hour had elapsed. 

He entered the barn leaving the door wide-open 
behind him. In its interior tightly packed bundles 
of dark-coloured hay rose up almost to the roof. The 
floor was littered with straw and newly-cut clover. 

On one side of the barn, beneath the piled-up hay, 
was a large shelving heap of threshed oats. Here, ob- 
viously, was the sort of place, if the lovers paused at 
this spot at all, where they would be tempted to recline. 

Directly opposite these oats, in the portion of the 
shed that was most in shadow, Clavering observed 
a narrow slit between the hay-bundles. He ap- 
proached this aperture and tried to wedge himself 
into it. The protruding stalks of the hay pricked his 
hands and face, and the dust choked him. 

With angry coughs and splutters, and with sundry 
savage expletives by no means suitable to a priest of 
the church, he at length succeeded in firmly imbedding 
himself in this impenetrable retreat. He worked him- 
self so far into the shadow, that not the most cautious 
eye could have discerned his presence. His sole 
danger lay in the fact that the dust might very easily 
give him an irresistible fit of sneezing. With the 
cessation of his violent struggles, however, this danger 
seemed to diminish; for the dust subsided as quickly 
as it had been raised, and otherwise, as he leant 
luxuriously back upon his warm-scented support, his 
position was by no means uncomfortable. 

Meanwhile Luke and Gladys were slowly and de- 
liberately crossing the darkening water-meadows. 

Gladys, whose geographical knowledge of the dis- 
trict was limited to the immediate vicinity of her 



THE GRANARY 639 

home had not the remotest guess as to where she 
was being led. For all she knew Luke might have 
gone crazy, like his brother, and be now intending to 
plunge both himself and her into the depths of some 
lonely pool or weir. Nevertheless, she continued 
passively and meekly following him, walking, when 
the path along the dyke's edge narrowed, at some few 
paces behind him, with that peculiar air of being a 
led animal, which one often observes in the partners 
of tramps, as they plod the roads in the wake of their 
masters. 

The expanse they traversed in this manner was 
possessed of a peculiar character of its own, a char- 
acter which that especial hour of twilight seemed to 
draw forth and emphasize. It differed from similar 
tracts of marsh-land, such as may be found by the 
sea's edge, in being devoid of any romantic horizon 
to afford a spiritual escape from the gloom it diffused. 

It was melancholy. It was repellant. It was sin- 
ister. It lacked the element of poetic expansiveness. 
It gave the impression of holding grimly to some 
dark obscene secret, which no visitation of sun or 
moon would ever cajole it into divulging. 

It depressed without overwhelming. It saddened 
without inspiring. With its reeds, its mud, its wil- 
lows, its livid phosphorescent ditches, it produced 
uneasiness rather than awe, and disquietude rather 
than solemnity. 

Bounded by rolling hills on all sides save one, it 
gave the persons who moved across it the sensation 
of being enclosed in some vast natural arena. 

Gladys wished she had brought her cloak with 
her, as the filmy white mists rose like ghosts out of 



640 WOOD AND STONE 

the stagnant ditches, and with clammy persistence 
invaded her unprotected form. 

It was one of those places that seem to suggest the 
transaction of no stirring or heroic deeds, but of 
gloomy, wretched, chance-driven occurrences. A be- 
trayed army might have surrendered there. 

Luke seemed to give himself up with grim reci- 
procity to the influences of the spot. He appeared 
totally oblivious of his meek companion, and except 
to offer her languid, absent-minded assistance across 
various gates and dams, he remained as completely 
wrapped in reserve as were the taciturn levels over 
which they passed. 

It was with an incredible sense of relief that Gladys 
found herself in the drier, more wholesome, atmos- 
sphere of Hullaway Chase. Here, as they walked 
briskly side by side over the thyme-scented turf, it 
seemed that the accumulated heat of the day, which, 
from the damp marsh-land only drew forth miasmic 
vapours, flung into the fragrant air delicious waftings 
of warm earth-breath. With still greater relief, and 
even with a little cry of joy, she caught sight of the 
friendly open door of the capacious barn, and the 
shadowy inviting heap of loose-flung oats lying be- 
neath its wall of hay. 

"Oh, we must go in here!" she cried, "what an 
adorable place!" 

They entered, and the girl threw upon Luke one of 
her slow, long, amorous glances. "Kiss me!" she 
said, holding up her mouth to him beseechingly. 

The faint light of the dying day fell with a pale 
glimmer upon her soft throat and rounded chin. 
Luke found himself disinclined to resist her. 



THE GRANARY 641 

There were tears on the girl's cheek when, loosening 
her hold upon his neck, she sank down on the idyllic 
couch offered them, and closed her eyes in childish 
contentment. 

Luke hung over her thoughtfully and sadly. There 
is always something sad, — something that seems to 
bring with it a withering breath from the ultimate 
futility of the universe, — about a lover's recognition 
that the form which formerly thrilled him with 
ecstasy, now leaves him cold and unmoved. Such 
sadness, chilly and desolate as the hand of death 
itself, crept over the stone-carver's heart, as he looked 
at the gently-stirring breast and softly-parted lips 
of his beautiful mistress. He bent down and kissed 
her forehead, caressing her passively yielded fin- 
gers. 

She opened her eyes and smiled at him, the linger- 
ing smile of a soothed and happy infant. 

They remained thus, silent and at rest, for several 
moments. It was not long, however, before the 
subtle instinct of an enamoured woman made the 
girl aware that her friend's responsiveness had been 
but a momentary impulse. She started up, her eyes 
wide-open and her lips trembling. 

"Luke!" she murmured, "Luke, darling, — " Her 
voice broke, in a curious little sob. 

Luke gazed at her blankly, thankful that the weight 
of weary foreknowledge upon his face was concealed 
from her by the growing darkness. 

"I want to say to you, my dear love," the girl 
went on, her bosom rising and falling in pitiful em- 
barrassment, and her white fingers nervously scooping 
up handful after handful of the shadowy grain. 



642 WOOD AND STONE 

"I want to say to you something that is — that 
is very serious — for us both, Luke, — I want to 
tell you, " 

Her voice once more died away, in the same inar- 
ticulate and curious gurgle, like the sob of water 
running under a weir. 

Luke rose to his feet and stood in front of her. 
"It's all right," he said calmly. "You needn't agi- 
tate yourself. I understand." 

The girl covered her face with her hands. "But 
what shall I do? What shall I do?" she sobbed. "I 
can't marry Ralph like this. He'll kill me when he 
finds out. I'm so afraid of him, Luke — you don't 
know, — you don't know, — " 

"He'll forgive you," answered the stone-carver 
quietly. "He's not a person to burst out like that. 
Lots of people have to confess these little things after 
they're married. Some men aren't half so particular 
as you girls think." 

Gladys raised her head and gave her friend a long 
queer look, the full import of which was concealed 
from him in the darkness. She made a futile little 
groping movement with her hand. 

"Luke," she whispered, "I must just say this to 
you even if it makes you angry. I shouldn't be happy 
afterwards — whatever happens — if I didn't say it. 
I want you to know that I'm ready, if you wish, if — 
if you love me enough for that, Luke, — to go away 
with you anywhere! I feel it isn't as it used to be. 
I feel everything's different. But I want you to know, 
— to know without any mistake — that I'd go at 
once — willingly — wherever you took me! 

"It's not that I'm begging you to marry me," 



THE GRANARY 643 

she wailed, "it's only that I love you, love you and 
want you so frightfully, my darling! 

"I wouldn't worry you, Luke," she added, in a low, 
pitiful little voice, that seemed to emerge rather from 
the general shadowiness of the place than from a 
human being's lips, "I wouldn't tease you, or scold 
you when you enjoyed yourself! It's only that I 
want to be with you, that I want to be near you. 
I never thought it would come to this. I thought — " 
Her voice died away again into the darkness. 

Luke began pacing up and down the floor of the 
barn. 

Once more she spoke. "I'd be faithful to you, 
Luke, married or unmmarried, — and I'd work, 
though I know you won't believe that. But I can 
do quite hard work, when I like!" 

By some malignity of chance, or perhaps by a 
natural reaction from her pleading words, Luke's mind 
reverted to her tone and temper on that June morn- 
ing when she insulted him by a present of money. 

"No, Gladys," he said. "It won't do. You and 
I weren't made for each other. There are certain 
things — many things — in me that you'll never 
understand, and I daresay there are things in you 
that I never shall. We're not made for one another, 
child, I tell you. We shouldn't be happy for a week. 
I know myself, and I know you, and I'm sure it 
wouldn't do. 

"Don't you fret yourself about Dangelis. If he 
finds out, he finds out — and that's the end of it. 
But I swear to you that I know him well enough to 
know that you've nothing to be afraid of — even if 
he does find out. He's not the kind of man to make 



644 WOOD AND STONE 

a fuss. I can see exactly the way he'd take it. He'd 
be sorry for you and laugh at himself, and plunge 
desperately into his painting. 

"I like Dangelis, I tell you frankly. I think he's 
a thoroughly generous and large-minded fellow. Of 
course I've hardly seen him to speak to, but you 
can't be mistaken about a man like that. At least 
I can't! I seem to know him in and out, up hill and 
down dale. 

"Make a fuss? Not he! He'll make this country 
ring and ting with the fame of his pictures. That's 
what he'll do! And as for being horrid to you — not 
he! I know him better than that. He'll be too much 
in love with you, too, — you little demon! That's 
another point to bear in mind. 

" Oh, you'll have the whip-hand of him, never fear, — 
and our son, — I hope it is a son my dear!- — will 
be treated as if it were his own. 

"I know him, I tell you! He's a thoroughly decent 
fellow, though a bit of a fool, no doubt. But we're 
all that! 

"Don't you be a little goose, Gladys, and get 
fussed up and worried over nothing. After all, what 
does it matter? Life's such a mad affair anyway! 
All we can do is to map things to the best of our 
ability, and then chance it. 

"We're all on the verge of a precipice. Do you 
think I don't realize that? But that's no reason why 
we should rush blindly up to the thing, and throw 
ourselves over. And it would be nothing else than 
that, nothing else than sheer madness, for you and I 
to go off together. 

"Do you think your father would give us a penny? 



THE GRANARY 645 

Not he! I detect in your father, Gladys, an ex- 
traordinary vein of obstinacy. You haven't clashed 
up against it yet, but try and play any of these games 
on him, and you'll see! 

"No; one thing you may be perfectly sure of, and 
that is, that whatever he finds out, Dangelis will 
never breathe a word to your father. He's madly in 
love with you, girl, I tell you; and if I'm out of the 
way, you'll be able to do just what you like with 
him!" 

It was completely dark now, and when Luke's 
oration came to an end there was no sound in the 
barn except a low sobbing. 

"Come on, child; we must be getting home, or 
you'll be frightfully late. Here! give me your hand. 
Where are you?" 

He groped about in the darkness until his sleeve 
brushed against her shoulder. It was trembling under 
her efforts to suppress her sobs. 

He got hold of her wrists and pulled her to her 
feet. "Come on, my dear," he repeated, "we must 
get out of this now. Give me one nice kiss before 
we go." 

She permitted herself to be caressed — passive and 
unresisting in his arms. 

In the darkness they touched the outer edge of 
Mr. Clavering's hiding-place, and the girl, swaying 
a little backwards under Luke's endearments, felt 
the pressure of the hay-wall behind her. She did not, 
however, feel the impassioned touch of the choking 
kiss which the poor imprisoned priest desperately 
imprinted on a loose tress of her hair. 

It was one of those pitiful and grotesque situa- 



646 WOOD AND STONE 

tions which seem sometimes to arise, — as our fan- 
tastic planet turns on its orbit, — for no other purpose 
than that of gratifying some malign vein of goblin- 
like irony in the system of things. 

That at the moment when Luke, under the spell 
of the shadowy fragrance of the place, and the pliant 
submissiveness of the girl's form, threw something 
of his old ardour into his kiss, her other, more des- 
perate love should have dared such an approach, was 
a coincidence apparently of the very kind to appeal 
to the perverse taste of this planetary humour. 

The actual result of such a strange consentane- 
ousness of rival emotion was that the three human 
heads remained for a brief dramatic moment in close 
juxtaposition, — the two fair ones and the dark one 
so near one another, that it might have seemed almost 
inevitable that their thoughts should interact in that 
fatal proximity. 

The pitiful pathos of the whole human comedy 
might well have been brought home to any curious 
observer able to pierce that twilight! Such an ob- 
server would have felt towards those three poor ob- 
sessed craniums the same sort of tenderness that 
they themselves would have been conscious of, had 
they suddenly come across a sleeping person or a 
dead body. 

Strange, that the ultimate pity in these things, — 
in this blind antagonistic striving of human desires 
under such gracious flesh and blood — should only 
arouse these tolerant emotions when they are no longer 
of any avail! Had some impossible bolt from heaven 
stricken these three impassioned ones in their tragic 
approximation, how, — long afterwards, — the dis- 



THE GRANARY 647 

coverer of the three skeletons would have moralized 
upon their fate! As it was, there was nothing but 
the irony of the gods to read what the irony of the 
gods was writing upon that moment's drowning 
sands. 

When Luke and Gladys left the barn, and hurriedly, 
under the rising moon, retook their way towards 
Nevilton, Clavering emerged from his concealment 
dazed and stupefied. He threw himself down in the 
darkness on the heap of oats and strove to give form 
and coherence to the wild flood of thoughts which 
swept through him. 

So this was what he had come out to learn! This 
was the knowledge that his mad jealousy had driven 
him to snatch! 

He thought of the exquisite sacredness — for him — 
of that morning's ritual in the church, and of how 
easily he had persuaded himself to read into the 
girl's preoccupied look something more than natural 
sadness over Andersen's death. He had indeed, — 
only those short hours ago, — allowed himself the 
sweet illusion that this religious initiation really 
meant, for his pagan love, some kind of Vita 
Nuova. 

The fates had rattled their dice, however, to a 
different tune. The unfortunate girl was indeed 
entering upon a Vita Nuova, but how hideously dif- 
ferent a one from that which had been his hope! 

On Wednesday came the confirmation service. 
How could he, — with any respect for his conscience 
as a guardian of these sacred rites, — permit Gladys 
to be confirmed now? Yet what ought he to do? 
Drops of cold sweat stood upon his forehead as he 



648 WOOD AND STONE 

wondered whether it was incumbent upon him to 
take the first train the following morning for the 
bishop's palace and to demand an interview. 

No. Tomorrow the prelate would be starting on 
his episcopal tour. Clavering would have to pursue 
him from one remote country village to another, and 
what a pursuit that would be! He recoiled from the 
idea with sick aversion. 

Could he then suppress his fatal knowledge and let 
the event take place without protest? To act in 
such a manner would be nothing less than to play 
the part of an accomplice in the girl's sin. 

Perhaps when the bishop actually appeared he 
would be able to secure a confidential interview with 
him and lay the whole matter before him. Or should 
he act on his own responsibility, and write to Gladys 
himself, telling her that under the circumstances it 
would be best for her to stay away from the cere- 
mony? 

What reason could he give for such an extraordinary 
mandate? Could he bluntly indicate to her, in black 
and white, the secret he had discovered, and the 
manner of its discovery? To accuse her on the ground 
of mere village gossip would be to lay himself open 
to shameful humiliation. Was he, in any case, justi- 
fied in putting the fatal information, gathered in this 
way, to so drastic a use? It was only in his madness 
as a jealous lover that he had possessed himself of 
this knowledge. As priest of Nevilton he knew 
nothing. 

He had no right to know anything. No; he must 
pay the penalty of his shameful insanity by bearing 
this burden in silence, even though his conscience 



THE GRANARY 649 

groaned and cracked beneath the weight. Such a 
silence, with its attendant misery of self-accusation 
and shame, was all he could offer to his treacherous 
enchantress as a tacit recompense for having stolen 
her secret. 

He rose and left the granary. As he walked home- 
ward, along the Nevilton road, avoiding by a sort 
of scrupulous reaction the shorter route followed by 
the others, it seemed to him as though the night had 
never been more sultry, or the way more loaded with 
the presence of impendent calamity. 



CHAPTER XXV 

METAMORPHOSIS 

THE day of James Andersen's funeral and of 
Gladys' confirmation happened to coincide with 
a remarkable and unexpected event in the life 
of Mr. Quincunx. Whatever powers, lurking in air 
or earth, were attempting at that moment to influ- 
ence the fatal stream of events in Nevilton, must 
have been grimly conscious of something preordained 
and inevitable about this eccentric man's drift to- 
wards appalling moral disaster. 

It seemed as though nothing on earth now could 
stop the marriage of Lacrima and Goring, and from 
the point of view of the moralist, or even of the per- 
son of normal decency, such a marriage, if it really 
did lead to Mr. Quincunx's pensioning at the hands 
of his enemy, necessarily held over him a shame and 
a disgrace proportionate to the outrage done to the 
girl who loved him. What these evil powers played 
upon, if evil powers they were, — and not the blind 
laws of cause and effect, — was the essential character 
of Mr. Quincunx, which nothing in heaven nor earth 
seemed able to change. 

There are often, however, elements in our fate, 
which lie, it might seem, deeper than any calculable 
prediction, deeper, it may be, than the influence of 
the most powerful supernatural agents, and these 
elements — unstirred by angel or devil — are some- 



METAMORPHOSIS 651 

times roused to activity by the least expected cause. 
It is, at these moments, as though Fate, in the incal- 
culable comprehensiveness of her immense designs, 
condescended to make use of Chance, her elfish 
sister, to carry out what the natural and normal 
stream of things would seem to have decreed as an 
impossibility. 

Probably not a living soul who knew him, — cer- 
tainly not Lacrima, — had the least expectation of 
any chance of change in Mr. Quincunx. But then 
none of these persons had really sounded the depths 
in the soul of the man. There were certain mysterious 
and unfathomable gulfs in the sea-floor of Mr. Quin- 
cunx's being which would have exhausted all the sor- 
ceries of Witch-Bessie even to locate. 

So fantastic and surprising are the ways of des- 
tiny, that, — as shall be presently seen, — what 
neither gods nor devils, nor men nor angels, could 
effect, was effected by nothing more nor less than a 
travelling circus. 

The day of the burying of James and the con- 
firmation of Gladys brought into Nevilton a curious 
cortege of popular entertainers. This cortege con- 
sisted of one of those small wandering circuses, which, 
during the month of August are wont to leave the 
towns and move leisurely among the remoter country 
villages, staying nowhere more than a night, and 
taking advantage of any local festival or club-meet- 
ing to enhance their popularity. 

The circus in question, — flamingly entitled 
Porter's Universal World-Show, — was owned and 
conducted by a certain Job Love, a shrewd and ava- 
ricious ruffian, who boasted, though with little justi- 



652 WOOD AND STONE 

fication, the inheritance of gipsy blood. As a matter 
of fact, the authentic gipsy tribes gave Mr. Love an 
extremely wide berth, avoiding his path as they would 
have avoided the path of the police. This cautious 
attitude was not confined, however, to gipsies. Every 
species of itinerant hawker and pedler avoided the 
path of Mr. Love, and the few toy-booths and sweet- 
stalls that followed his noisy roundabouts were a 
department of his own providing. 

It was late on Tuesday night when the World-Show 
established itself in Nevilton Square. The sound of 
hammers and the barking of dogs was the last thing 
that the villagers heard before they slept, and the 
first thing they heard when they awoke. 

The master of the World-Show spent the night 
according to his custom in solitary regal grandeur 
in the largest of his caravans. The sun had not, 
however, pierced the white mists in the Nevilton 
orchards before Mr. Love was up and abroad. The 
first thing he did, on descending the steps of his 
caravan, was to wash his hands and face in the basin 
of the stone fountain. His next proceeding was to 
measure out into a little metal cup which he pro- 
duced from his pocket a small quantity of brandy 
and to pour this refreshment, diluted with water from 
the fountain, down his capacious throat. 

Mr. Love was a lean man, of furtive and irascible 
appearance. His countenance, bleached by exposure 
into a species of motley-coloured leather, shone after 
its immersion in the fountain like the knob of a well- 
worn cudgel. His whitish hair, cut in convict style 
close to his head, emphasized the polished mahogany 
of his visage, from the upper portion of which his 



METAMORPHOSIS 653 

sky-blue eyes, small and glittering, shone out de- 
fiantly upon the world, like ominous jewels set in the 
forehead of an obscene and smoke-darkened idol. 

Having replaced his cup and flask in his pocket, 
the master of the World-Show looked anxiously at 
the omens of the weather, snuffing the morning breeze 
with the air of one not lightly to be fooled either by 
rain or shine. Returning to the still silent circus, 
he knocked sharply with his knuckles at the door of 
the smallest of the three caravans. 

"Flick!" he shouted, "let me in! Flick! Old 
Flick! Darn 'ee, man, for a blighting sand-louse! 
Open the door, God curse you! Old Flick! Old 
Flick! Old Flick!" 

Thus assaulted, the door of the caravan was opened 
from within, and Mr. Love pushed his way into the 
interior. A strange enough sight met him when 
once inside. 

The individual apostrophized as "Old Flick" closed 
and bolted the door with extraordinary precaution, 
as soon as his master had entered, and then turned 
and hovered nervously before him, while Mr. Love 
sank down on the only chair in the place. The 
caravan was bare of all furniture except a rough 
cooking-stove and a three-legged deal table. But it 
was at neither of these objects that Job Love stared, 
as he tilted back his chair and waved impatiently 
aside the deprecatory old man. 

Stretched on a ragged horse-blanket upon the floor 
lay a sleeping child. Clothed in little else than a 
linen bodice and a short flannel petticoat, she turned 
restlessly in her slumber under Mr. Love's scrutiny, 
and crossing one bare leg over the other, flung out 



654 WOOD AND STONE 

a long white arm, while her dark curls, disturbed by 
her movement, fell over her face and hid it from 
view. 

"Ah!" remarked Mr. Love. "Quieter now, I see. 
She must dance today, Flick, and no mistake about it! 
You must take her out in the fields this morning, 
like you did that other one. I can't have no more 
rampaging and such-like, in my decent circus. But 
she must dance, there's no getting over that, — she 
must dance, Old Flick! 'Twas your own blighting 
notion to take her on, remember; and I can't have no 
do-nothing foreigners hanging around, specially now 
August be come. 

"What did she say her nonsense-name was? Lores, 

— Dolores? Whoever heard tell of such a name as 
that?" 

The sound of his voice seemed to reach the child 
even in her sleep; for flinging her arms over her head, 
and turning on her back, she uttered a low indis- 
tinguishable murmur. Her eyes, however, remained 
closed, the dark curves of her long eye-lashes contrast- 
ing with the scarlet of her mouth and the ivory 
pallor of her skin. 

Even Job Love — though not precisely an aesthete 

— was struck by the girl's beauty. 

"She'll make a fine dancer, Flick, a fine dancer! 
How old dost think she be? 'Bout twelve, or may-be 
more, I reckon. 

" 'Tis pity she won't speak no Christian word. 'Tis 
wonderful, how these foreign childer do hold so 
obstinate by their darned fancy-tongue! 

"We must trim her out in them spangle-gauzes of 
Skipsy Jane. She were the sort of girl to make the 



METAMORPHOSIS 655 

boys holler. But this one'll do well enough, I reckon, 
if so be she goes smilin' and chaffin' upon the boards. 

"But no more of that devil's foolery, Flick? Dost 
hear, man? Take her out into the fields; — take her 
out into the fields! She must dance and she must 
smile, all in Skipsy Jane's spangles, come noon this 
day. She must do so, Flick — or I ain't Jobie Love!" 

The old man paused in his vague moth-like hover- 
ing, and surveyed the outstretched figure. His own 
appearance was curious enough to excite a thrill of 
intense curiosity, had any less callous eye but that of 
his master been cast upon him. 

He produced the effect not so much of a living 
person, animated by natural impulses, as of a dead 
body possessed by some sort of wandering spirit 
which made use of him for its own purposes. 

If by chance this spirit were to desert him, one 
felt that what would be left of Old Flick would be 
nothing but the mask of a man, — a husk, a shard, a 
withered stalk, a wisp of dried-up grass! The old 
creature was as thin as a lathe; and his cavernous, 
colourless eyes and drooping jaw looked, in that 
indistinct light, as vague and shadowy as though they 
belonged to some phantasmal mirage of mist and 
rain drifted in from the sleeping fields. 

"How did 'ee ever get Mother Sterner to let 'ee 
have so dainty a bit of goods?" went on Mr. Love, 
continuing his survey of their unconscious captive. 
"The old woman must have been blind-scared of the 
police or summat, so as to want to be free of the 
maid. 'Tisn't every day you can pick up a lass so 
cut out for the boards as she be." 

At intervals during his master's discourse the 



656 WOOD AND STONE 

parchment-like visage of the old man twisted and 
contorted itself, as if with the difficulty of finding 
words. 

When Job Love at last became silent, the words 
issued from him as if they had been rustling eddies of 
chaff, blown through dried stalks. 

"I've tried her with one thing, Mister, and I've 
tried her with another, — but 'tis no use ; she do cry 
and cry, and there's no handling her. I guess I must 
take her into them fields, as you do say. 'Tis because 
of folks hearing that she do carry on so." 

Job Love frowned and scratched his forehead. 

"Damn her," he cried, "for a limpsy cat! Well — 
Old Flick — ye picked her up and ye must start her 
off. This show don't begin till nigh along noon, — 
so if ye thinks ye can bring her to reason, some ways 
or 'tother ways, off with 'ee, my man! Get her a 
bite of breakfast first, — and good luck to 'ee ! Only 
don't lets have no fuss, and don't let's have no 
onlookers. I'm not the man to stand for any law- 
breaking. This show's a decent show, and Job 
Love's a decent man. If the wench makes trouble, 
ye must take her back where she did come from. 
Mother Sterner'll have to slide down. I can't have 
no quarrels with King and Country, over a limpsy 
maid like she!" 

Uttering these words in a tone of formidable 
finality, Mr. Love moved to the entrance and let 
himself out. 

Their master gone, Old Flick turned waveringly to 
the figure on the floor. Taking down a faded coat 
from its peg on the wall, he carefully spread it over 
the child, tucking it round her body with shaking 



METAMORPHOSIS 657 

hands. He then went to the stove in the corner, lit 
it, and arranged the kettle. From the stove he 
turned to the three-legged table; and removing from 
a hanging cupboard a tea-pot, some cups and plates, 
a loaf of bread and a pat of butter, he set out these 
objects with meticulous nicety, avoiding the least 
clatter or sound. This done, he sat down upon the 
solitary chair, and waited the boiling of the water with 
inscrutable passivity. 

From outside the caravan came the shuffle of 
stirring feet and the murmur of subdued and drowsy 
voices. The camp was beginning to enter upon its 
labour of preparation. 

When he had made tea, Old Flick touched his 
sleeping captive lightly on the shoulder. 

The girl started violently, and sat up, with wide- 
open eyes. She began talking hurriedly, protesting 
and imploring; but not a word of her speech was 
intelligible to Old Flick, for the simple reason that it 
was Italian, — Italian of the Neapolitan inflexion. 

The old man handed her a strong cup of tea, to- 
gether with a large slice of bread-and-butter, uttering 
as he did so all manner of soothing and reassuring 
words. When she had finished her breakfast he 
brought her water and soap. 

"Tidy thee-self up, my pretty," he said. "We be 
goin' out, along into them fields, present." 

Bolting the caravan door on the outside, he shuffled 
off to the fountain to perform his own ablutions, and 
to assist his companions in unloading the stage- 
properties, and setting up the booths and swings. 
After the lapse of an hour he climbed the caravan- 
steps and re-entered softly. 



658 WOOD AND STONE 

He found the girl crouched in a corner, her hands 
clasped over her knees, and traces of tears upon her 
cheeks. Before leaving her, the old man had placed 
shoes and stockings by her side, and these she now 
wore, together with a dark-coloured skirt and a scarlet 
gipsy-shawl. 

"Come," he said. "Thee be goin' wi' I into the 
fields. Thee be goin' to learn a dancin' trick or two. 
Show opens along of noon; and Master, he's goin' to 
let 'ee have Skipsy Jane's spangles." 

How much of this the child understood it is im- 
possible to say; but the old man's tone was not 
threatening, and the idea of being taken away — 
somewhere — anywhere — roused vague hopes in her 
soul. She pulled the red shawl over her head and 
let him lead her by the hand. 

Down the steps they clambered, and hurriedly 
threaded their way across the square. 

The old man took the road towards Yeoborough, 
and turned with the girl up Dead Man's Lane. He 
was but dimly acquainted with the neighbourhood; 
but once before, in his wanderings as a pedler, he had 
encamped in a certain grassy hollow bordering on the 
Auber Woods, and the memory of the seclusion of 
this spot drew him now. 

As they passed Mr. Quincunx's garden they en- 
countered the solitary himself, who, in his sympathy 
with Luke Andersen on this particular day, had 
resolved to pay the young man an early morning 
visit. 

The recluse looked with extreme and startled 
interest at this singular pair. The child's beauty 
struck him with a shock that almost took his breath 



METAMORPHOSIS 659 

away. There was something about the haunting 
expression of her gaze as she turned it upon him that 
roused an overpowering flood of tenderness and pity 
in untouched abysses of his being. 

There must have been some instantaneous reciproc- 
ity in the eccentric man's grey eyes, for the young 
girl turned back after they had passed, and throwing 
the shawl away from her head, fixed upon him what 
seemed a deliberate and beseeching look of ap- 
peal. 

Mr. Quincunx was so completely carried out of his 
normal self by this imploring look that he went so 
far as to answer its inarticulate prayer by a wave of 
his hand, and by a sign that indicated, — whether 
she understood it or not, — that he intended to render 
her assistance. 

In his relations with Lacrima Mr. Quincunx was 
always remotely conscious that the girl's character 
was stronger than his own, and — Pariah-like — this 
had the effect of lessening the emotion he felt towards 
her. 

But now — in the look of the little Dolores — there 
was an appeal from a weakness and helplessness much 
more desperate than his own, — an appeal to him from 
the deepest gulfs of human dependence. The glance 
she had given him burned in his brain like a coal of 
white fire. It seemed to cry out to him from all the 
flotsam and jetsam, all the drift and wreckage of 
everything that had ever been drowned, submerged, 
and stranded, by the pitilessness of Life, since the 
foundation of the world. 

The child's look had indeed the same effect upon 
Mr. Quincunx that the look of his Master had upon 



660 WOOD AND STONE 

the fear-stricken Apostle, in the hall of Caiaphas the 
high priest. In one heart-piercing stab it brought to 
his overpowered consciousness a vision of all the 
victims of cruelty who had ever cried aloud for help 
since the generations of men began their tragic 
journey. 

Perhaps to all extremely sensitive natures of Mr. 
Quincunx's type, a type of morbidly self-conscious 
weakness as well as sensitiveness, the electric stir 
produced by beauty and sex can only reach a culmina- 
tion when the medium of its appearance approximates 
to the extreme limit of fragility and helpless- 
ness. 

Hell itself, so to speak, had to display to him its 
span-long babes, before he could be aroused to de- 
scend and "harrow" it! But once roused in him, this 
latent spirit of the pitiful Son of Man became formi- 
dable, reckless, irresistible. The very absence in him 
of the usual weight of human solidity and "character" 
made him the more porous to this divine mood. 

Anyone who watched him returning hastily to his 
cottage from the garden-gate would have been amazed 
by the change in his countenance. He looked and 
moved like a man under a blinding illumination. So 
must the citizen of Tarsus have looked, when he 
staggered into the streets of Damascus. 

He literally ran into his kitchen, snatched up his 
hat and stick, poured a glass of milk down his throat, 
put a couple of biscuits into his pocket, and re-issued, 
ready for his strange pursuit. He hurried up the 
lane to the first gate that offered itself, and passing 
into the field continued the chase on the further side 
of the hedge. 



METAMORPHOSIS 661 

The old man evidently found the hill something 
of an effort, for it was not long before Mr. Quincunx 
overtook them. 

He passed them by unremarked, and continued his 
advance along the hedgerow till he reached the 
summit of the ridge between Wild Pine and Seven 
Ashes. Here, concealed behind a clump of larches, 
he awaited their approach. To his surprise, they 
entered one of the fields on the opposite side of the 
road, and began walking across it. 

Mr. Quincunx watched them. In a corner of the 
field they were crossing lay a spacious hollow, — once 
the bed of a pond, — but now quite dry and over- 
grown with moss and clover. 

Old Flick's instinct led him to this spot, as one 
well adapted to the purpose he had in mind, both by 
reason of its absolute seclusion and by reason of its 
smooth turf-floor. 

Mr. Quincunx waited till their two figures vanished 
into this declivity, and then he himself crossed the 
field in their track. 

Having reached the mossy level of the vanished 
pond, — a place which seemed as though Nature her- 
self had designed it with a view to his present inten- 
tion, — Old Flick assumed a less friendly air towards 
his captive. A psychologist interested in searching 
out the obscure workings of derelict and submerged 
souls, would have come to the speedy conclusion as 
he watched the old man's cadaverous face that the 
spirit which at present animated his corpse-like body 
was one that had little commiseration or compunction 
in it. 

The young Dolores had not, it seemed, to deal at 



662 WOOD AND STONE 

this moment with an ordinary human scoundrel, but 
with a faded image of humanity galvanized into life 
by some conscienceless Larva. 

In proportion as this unearthly obsession grew upon 
Old Flick, his natural countenance grew more and 
more dilapidated and withered. Innumerable years 
seemed suddenly added to the burden he already 
carried. The lines of his face assumed a hideous and 
Egyptian immobility ; only his eyes, as he turned them 
upon his companion, were no longer colourless. 

"Doll," said he, "now thee must try thee's steps, 
or 'twill be the worse for thee!" 

The girl only answered by flinging herself down on 
her knees before him, and pouring forth unintelligible 
supplications. 

"No more o' this," cried the old man; "no more o' 
this! I've got to learn 'ee to dance, — and learn 'ee 
to dance I will. Ye'll have to go on them boards 
come noon, whether 'ee will or no!" 

The child only clasped her hands more tightly 
together, and renewed her pleading. 

It would have needed the genius of some supreme 
painter, and of such a painter in an hour of sheer 
insanity, to have done justice to the extraordinary 
expression that crossed the countenance of Old Flick 
at that moment. The outlines of his face seemed to 
waver and decompose. None but an artist who had, 
like the insatiable Leonardo, followed the very dead 
into their forlorn dissolution, could have indicated 
the setting of his eyes; and his eyes themselves, 
madness alone could have depicted. 

With a sudden vicious jerk the old man snatched 
the shawl from the girl's shoulders, flung it on the 



METAMORPHOSIS 663 

ground, and seizing her by the wrists pulled her up 
upon her feet. 

"Dance, ye baggage!" he cried hoarsely; — "dance, 
I tell 'ee!" 

It was plain that the luckless waif understood 
clearly enough now what was required of her, and it 
was also plain that she recognized that the moment 
for supplication had gone by. She stepped back a 
pace or two upon the smooth turf, and slipping off 
her unlaced shoes, — shoes far too large for her small 
feet, — she passed the back of her hand quickly 
across her eyes, shook her hair away from her fore- 
head, and began a slow, pathetic little dance. 

"Higher!" cried Old Flick in an excited voice, 
beating the air with his hand and humming a strange 
snatch of a tune that might have inspired the dances 
of Polynesian cannibals. "Higher, I tell 'ee " 

The girl felt compelled to obey; and putting one 
hand on her hip and lifting up her skirt with the 
other, she proceeded, shyly and in forlorn silence, to 
dance an old Neapolitan folk-dance, such as might be 
witnessed, on any summer evening, by the shores of 
Amalfi or Sorrento. 

It was at this moment that Mr. Quincunx made his 
appearance against the sky-line above them. He 
looked for one brief second at the girl's bare arms, 
waving curls, and light-swinging body, and then leapt 
down between them. 

All nervousness, all timidity, seemed to have fallen 
away from him like a snake's winter-skin under the 
spring sun. He seized the child's hand with an air 
of indescribable gentleness and authority, and made 
so menacing and threatening a gesture that Old 



664 WOOD AND STONE 

Flick, staggering backwards, nearly fell to the 
ground. 

"Whose child is this?" he demanded sternly, 
soothing the frightened little dancer with one hand, 
while with the other he shook his cane in the direction 
of the gasping and protesting old man. 

"Whose child is this? You've stolen her, you old 
rascal! You're no Italian, — anyone can see that! 
You're a damned old tramp, and if you weren't so 
old and ugly I'd beat you to death; do you hear? — 
to death, you villain! Whose child is she? Can't 
you speak? Take care; I'm badly tempted to make 
you taste this, — to make you skip and dance a little! 

"What do you say? Job Love's circus? Well, — 
he's not an Italian either, is he? So if you haven't 
stolen her, he has." 

He turned to the child, stooping over her with 
infinite tenderness, and folding the shawl of which she 
had again possessed herself, with hands as gentle as a 
mother's, about her shoulders and head. 

"Where are your parents, my darling?" he asked, 
adding with a flash of amazing presence of mind, — 
"your 'padre' and 'madre'?" 

The girl seemed to get the drift of the question, and 
with a pitiful little smile pointed earth-ward, and 
made a sweeping gesture with both her hands, as if 
to indicate the passing of death's wings. 

"Dead? — both dead, eh?" muttered Mr. Quin- 
cunx. "And these rascals who've got hold of you 
are villains and rogues? Damned rogues! Damned 
villains!" 

He paused and muttered to himself. "What the 
devil's the Italian for a god-forsaken rascal? — 



METAMORPHOSIS 665 

'Cattivo!' 'Tutto cattivo!' — the whole lot of 
them a set of confounded scamps!" 

The child nodded her head vigorously. 

"You see," he cried, turning to Old Flick "she 
disowns you all. This is clearly a most knavish 
piece of work! What were you doing to the child? 
eh? eh? eh?" Mr. Quincunx accompanied these final 
syllables with renewed flourishes of his stick in the air. 

Old Flick retreated still further away, his legs 
shaking under him. "Here, — you can clear out of 
this! Do you understand? You can clear out of 
this; and go back to your damned master, and tell 
him I'm going to send the police after him! 

"As for this girl, I'm going to take her home with 
me. So off you go, — you old reprobate; and thank- 
ful you may be that I haven't broken every bone in 
your body! I've a great mind to do it now. Upon 
my soul I've a great mind to do it! 

" Shall I beat him into a jelly for you, — my darling? 
Shall I make him skip and dance for you?" 

The child seemed to understand his gestures, if not 
his words; for she clung passionately to his hands, and 
pressing them to her lips, covered them with kisses; 
shaking her head at the same time, as much as to 
say, "Old Flick is nothing. Let Old Flick go to the 
devil, as long as I can stay with you!" In some such 
manner as this, at any rate, Mr. Quincunx interpreted 
her words. 

"Sheer off, then, you old scoundrel! Shog off back 
to your confounded circus! And when you've got 
there, tell your friends, — Job Love and his gang, — 
that if they want this little one they'd better come 
and fetch her! 



666 WOOD AND STONE 

"Dead Man's Lane, — that's where I live. It's 
easily enough found; and so is the police-station in 
Yeoborough, — as you and your damned kidnappers 
shall discover before you've done with me!" 

Uttering these words in a voice so menacing that 
the old man shook like an aspen-leaf, Mr. Quincunx 
took the girl by the hand, and, ascending the grassy 
slope, walked off with her across the field. 

Old Flick seemed reduced to a condition border- 
ing upon imbecility. He staggered up out of that 
unpropitious hollow, and stood stock-still, like one 
petrified, until they were out of sight. Then, very 
slowly and mumbling incoherently to himself, he made 
his way back towards the village. 

He did not even turn his head as he passed Mr. 
Quincunx's cottage. Indeed, it is extremely doubtful 
how far he had recognized him as the person they 
encountered on their way, and still more doubtful 
how far he had heard or understood, when the tenant 
of Dead Man's Lane indicated the place of his abode. 

The sudden transformation of the timid recluse 
into a formidable man of action did not end with his 
triumphant retirement to his familiar domain. Some 
mysterious fibre in his complicated temperament had 
been struck, and continued to be struck, by the little 
Dolores, which not only rendered him indifferent to 
personal danger, but willing and happy to encoun- 
ter it. 

The event only added one more proof to the sage 
dictum of the Chinese philosopher, — that you can 
never tell of what a man is capable until he is stone- 
dead. 



CHAPTER XXVI 

VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS 

DURING the hours when Mr. Quincunx was 
undergoing this strange experience, several 
other human brains under the roofs of Nevil- 
ton were feeling the pressure of extreme perturbation. 

Gladys, after a gloomy breakfast, which was 
rendered more uncomfortable, not only by her father's 
chaffing references to the approaching ceremony, 
but by a letter from Dangelis, had escaped to her 
room to be assisted by Lacrima in dressing for the 
confirmation. 

In his letter the artist declared his intention of 
spending that night at the Gloucester Hotel in Wey- 
mouth, and begged his betrothed to forgive this delay 
in his return to her side. 

This communication caused Gladys many tremors 
of disquietude. Could it be possible that the Ameri- 
can had found out something and that he had gone 
to Weymouth to meditate at leisure upon his course 
of action? 

In any case this intimation of a delay in his return 
irritated the girl. It struck her in her tenderest spot. 
It was a direct flouting of her magnetic power. It 
was an insult to her sex- vanity. 

She had seen nothing of Luke since their Sunday's 
excursion; and as Lacrima, with cold submissive 
fingers, helped her to arrange her white dress and 



668 WOOD AND STONE 

virginal veil, she could hear the sound of the bell 
tolling for James Andersen's funeral. 

Mingled curiously enough with this melancholy 
vibration falling at protracted intervals upon the air, 
like the stroke of some reiterated hammer of doom, 
came another sound, a sound of a completely oppo- 
site character, — the preluding strains, namely, of the 
steam roundabouts of Porter's Universal Show. 

It was as though on one side of the village the 
angel of death were striking an iron-threatening gong, 
while, on the other side, the demons of life were 
howling a brazen defiance. 

The association of the two sounds as they reached 
her at this critical hour brought the figure of Luke 
vividly and obsessingly into her mind. How well she 
knew the sort of comment he would make upon the 
bizarre combination! Beneath the muslin frills of 
her virginal dress, — a dress that made her look fairer 
and younger than usual, — her heart ached with sick 
longing for her evasive lover. 

The wheel had indeed come full circle for the fair- 
haired girl. She could not help the thought recurring 
again and again, as Lacrima's light fingers adjusted 
her veil, that the next time she dressed in this manner 
it would be for her wedding-day. Her one profound 
consolation lay in the knowledge that her cousin, 
even more deeply than herself, dreaded the approach 
of that fatal Thursday. 

Her hatred for the pale-cheeked Italian re-accumu- 
lated every drop of its former venom, as with an air 
of affectionate gratitude she accepted her assistance. 

It is a psychological peculiarity of certain human 
beings that the more they hate, the more they crave, 



VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS 669 

with a curious perverted instinct, some sort of physical 
contact with the object of their hatred. 

Every touch of Lacrima's hand increased the 
intensity of Gladys' loathing; and yet, so powerful is 
the instinct to which I refer, she lost no opportunity 
of accentuating the contact between them, letting 
their fingers meet again and again, and even their 
breath, and throwing back her rounded chin to make 
it easier for those hated wrists to busy themselves 
about her throat. Her general air was an air of 
playful passivity; but at one moment, imprinting a kiss 
on the girl's arm as, in the process of arranging her 
veil, it brushed across her cheek, she seemed almost 
anxious to convey to Lacrima the full implication of 
her real feeling. 

Never has a human caress been so electric with the 
vibrations of antipathy, as was that kiss. She fol- 
lowed up this signal of animosity by a series of feline 
taunts relative to John Goring, one of which, from 
its illuminated insight into the complex strata of the 
girl's soul, delighted her by its effect. 

Lacrima winced under it, as if under the sting of a 
lash, and a burning flood of scarlet suffused her 
cheeks. She dropped her hands and stepped back, 
uttering a fierce vow that nothing — nothing on 
earth — would induce her to accompany a girl who 
could say such things, to such a ceremony! 

"No, I wouldn't, — I wouldn't!" cried Gladys 
mockingly. "I wouldn't dream of coming with me! 
Tomorrow week, anyway, we're bound to go to church 
side by side. Father wanted to drive with me then, 
you know, and to let mother go with you, — but I 
wouldn't hear of it! I said they must go in one 



670 WOOD AND STONE 

carriage, and you and I in another, so that our last 
drive together we should be quite by ourselves. 
You'll like that, won't you, darling?" 

Lacrima's only answer to this was to turn her back 
to her cousin, and begin putting on her hat and 
gloves. 

"I know where you're going," said Gladys. "You're 
going to see your dear Maurice. Give him my love! 
I should be ashamed to let such a wretched coward 
come near me. 

"James — poor boy! — was a fellow of a different 
metal. He'd some spirit in him. Listen! When that 
bell stops tolling they'll be carrying him into the 
church. I expect you're thinking now, darling, that 
it would have been better if you'd treated him 
differently. Of course you know it's you that killed 
him? Oh, nobody else! Just little Lacrima and her 
coy, demure ways! 

"I've never killed a man. I can say that, at all 
events. 

"That's right! Run off to her dear Maurice, — 
her dear brave Maurice! Perhaps he'll take her on 
his knees again, and she'll play the sweet little inno- 
cent, — like that day when I peeped through the 
window!" 

This final dart had hardly reached its objective 
before Lacrima without attempting any retort rushed 
from the room. 

"I will go and see Maurice. I will! I will!" she 
murmured to herself as she ran down the broad oak 
stair-case, and slipped out by the East door. 

Simultaneously with these events, a scene of equal 
dramatic intensity, though of a very different charac- 



VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS 671 

ter, was being enacted in the vicarage drawing-room. 
Vennie, as we have noted, had resolved to postpone 
for the present her reception into the Catholic Church. 
She had also resolved that nothing on earth should 
induce her to reveal to her mother her change of 
creed until the thing was an accomplished fact. The 
worst, however, of the kind of mental suppression in 
which she had been living of late, is that it tends to 
produce a volcanic excitement of the nerves, liable at 
any moment to ungovernable upheavals. Quite little 
things — mere straws and bagatelles — are enough to 
set this eruption beginning; and when once it begins, 
the accumulated passion of the long days of fermenta- 
tion gives the explosion a horrible force. 

One perpetual annoyance to Vennie was her 
mother's persistent fondness for family prayers. It 
seemed to the girl as though Valentia insisted on this 
performance, not so much out of a desire to serve 
God, as out of a sense of what was due to herself as 
the mistress of a well-conducted establishment. 

Vennie always fancied she discerned a peculiar 
tone of self-satisfaction in her mother's voice, as, 
rather loudly, and extremely clearly, she read her 
liturgical selections to the assembled servants. 

On this particular morning the girl had avoided 
the performance of this rite, by leaving her room 
earlier than usual and taking refuge in the furthest 
of the vicarage orchards. Backwards and forwards 
she walked, in that secluded place, with her hands 
behind her and her head bent, heedless of the drench- 
ing dew which covered every grass-blade and of the 
heavy white mists that still hung about the tree- 
trunks. She was obliged to return to her room and 



672 WOOD AND STONE 

change her shoes and stockings before joining her 
mother at breakfast, but not before she had prayed 
a desperate prayer, down there among the misty trees, 
for the eternal rest of James Andersen's soul. 

This little incident of her absence from prayers 
was the direct cause of the unfortunate scene that 
followed. 

Valentia hardly spoke to her daughter while the 
meal proceeded, and when at last it was over, she 
retired to the drawing-room and began writing letters. 

This was an extremely ill-omened sign to anyone 
who knew Mrs. Seldom's habits. Under normal 
conditions, her first proceeding after breakfast was to 
move to the kitchen, where she engaged in a long 
culinary debate with both cook and gardener; a course 
of action which was extremely essential, as without it, 

— so bitter was the feud between these two worthies, 

— it is unlikely that there would have been any vegeta- 
bles at all, either for lunch or dinner. When anything 
occurred to throw her into a mood of especially good 
spirits, she would pass straight out of the French 
window on to the front lawn, and armed with a pair 
of formidable garden-scissors would make a selection 
of flowers and leaves appropriate to a festival temper. 

But this adjournment at so early an hour to the 
task of letter-writing indicated that Valentia was in a 
condition of mind, which in anyone but a lady of her 
distinction and breeding could have been called noth- 
ing less than a furious rage. For of all things in the 
world, Mrs. Seldom most detested this business of 
writing letters ; and therefore, — with that perverse 
self-punishing instinct, which is one of the most 
artful weapons of offence given to refined gentle- 



VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS 673 

women, — she took grim satisfaction in setting herself 
down to write; thus producing chaos in the kitchen, 
where the gardener refused to obey the cook, and 
miserable remorse in the heart of Vennie, who wan- 
dered up and down the lawn meditating a penitential 
apology. 

Satisfied in her heart that she was causing universal 
annoyance and embarrassment by her proceeding, 
and yet quite confident that there was nothing but 
what was proper and natural in her writing letters 
at nine o'clock in the morning, Valentia began, by 
gentle degrees, to recover her lost temper. 

The only real sedative to thoroughly aggravated 
nerves, is the infliction of similar aggravation upon 
the nerves of others. This process is like the laying 
on of healing ointment; and the more extended the 
disturbance which we have the good fortune to create, 
the sooner we ourselves recover our equanimity. 

Valentia had already cast several longing glances 
through the window at the heavy sunshine falling 
mistily on the asters and petunias, and in another 
moment she would probably have left her letter and 
joined her daughter in the garden, had not Vennie 
anticipated any such movement by entering the room 
herself. 

"I ought to make you understand, mother," the 
girl began as soon as she stepped in, speaking in that 
curious strained voice which people assume when they 
have worked themselves up to a pitch of nervous 
excitement, "that when I don't appear at prayers, it 
isn't because I'm in a sulky temper, or in any mad 
haste to get out of doors. It's — it's for a different 
reason." 



674 WOOD AND STONE 

Valentia gazed at her in astonishment. The tone 
in which Vennie spoke was so tense, her eyes shone 
with such a strange brilliance, and her look was alto- 
gether so abnormal, that Mrs. Seldom completely 
forget her injured priestess- vanity, and waited in 
sheer maternal alarm for the completion of the girl's 
announcement. 

"Its because I've made up my mind to become a 
Catholic, and Catholics aren't allowed to attend any 
other kind of service than their own." 

Valentia rose to her feet and looked at her daughter 
in blank dismay. Her first feeling was one of over- 
powering indignation against Mr. Taxater, to whose 
treacherous influence she felt certain this madness 
was mainly due. 

There was a terrible pause during which Vennie, 
leaning against the back of a chair, was conscious that 
both herself and her mother were trembling from 
head to foot. The soft murmur of wood-pigeons 
wafted in from the window, was now blended with 
two other sounds, the sound of the tolling of the 
church-bell and the sound of the music of Mr. 
Love's circus, testing the efficiency of its round- 
abouts. 

"So this is what it has come to, is it?" said the 
old lady at last. "And I suppose the next thing 
you'll tell me, in this unkind, inconsiderate way, is 
that you've decided to become a nun!" 

Vennie made a little movement with her head. 

"You have?" cried Valentia, pale with anger. 
"You have made up your mind to do that? Well — 
I wouldn't have believed it of you, Vennie! In spite 
of everything I've done for you; in spite of everything 



VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS 675 

I've taught you; in spite of everything I've prayed 
for; — you can go and do this! Oh, you're an unkind, 
ungrateful girl! But I know that look on your face. 
I've known it from your childhood. When you look 
like that there's no hope of moving you. Go on, 
then! Do as you wish to do. Leave your mother in 
her old age, and destroy the last hope of our family. 
I won't speak another word. I know nothing I can 
say will change you." She sank down upon the 
chintz-covered sofa and covered her face with her 
hands. 

Vennie cursed herself for her miserable want of 
tact. What demon was it that had tempted her to 
break her resolution? Then, suddenly, as she looked 
at her mother swaying to and fro on the couch, a 
strange impulse of hard inflexible obstinacy rose up 
in her. 

These wretched human affections, — so unbalanced 
and selfish, — what a relief to escape from them 
altogether! Like the passing on its way, across a 
temperate ocean, of some polar iceberg, there drove, 
at that moment, through Vennie's consciousness, a 
wedge of frozen, adamantine contempt for all these 
human, too-human clingings and clutchings which 
would fain imprison the spirit and hold it down with 
soft-strangling hands. 

In her deepest heart she turned almost savagely 
away from this grey-haired woman, sitting there so 
hurt in her earthly affections and ambitions. She 
uttered a fierce mental invocation to that other 
Mother, — her whose heart, pierced by seven swords, 
had submitted to God's will without a groan! 

Valentia, who, it must be remembered, had not 



676 WOOD AND STONE 

only married a Seldom, but was herself one of that 
breed, felt at that moment as though this girl of 
hers were reverting to some mad strain of Pre-Eliza- 
bethan fanaticism. There was something mediaeval 
about Vennie's obstinacy, as there was something 
mediaeval about the lines of her face. Valentia 
recalled a portrait she had once seen of an ancestor 
of theirs in the days before the Reformation. He, the 
great Catholic Baron, had possessed the same thin 
profile and the same pinched lips. It was a curious 
revenge, the poor lady thought, for those evicted 
Cistercians, out of whose plundered house the Nevil- 
ton mansion had been built, that this fate, of all 
fates, should befall the last of the Seldoms! 

The tolling of the bell, which hitherto had gone on, 
monotonously and insistently, across the drowsy 
lawn, suddenly stopped. 

Vennie started and ran hurriedly to the door. 

"They are burying James Andersen," she cried, 
"and I ought to be there. It would look unkind and 
thoughtless of me not to be there. Good-bye, mother! 
We'll talk of this when I come back. I'm sorry to 
be so unsatisfactory a daughter to you, but perhaps 
you'll feel differently some day." 

Left to herself, Valentia Seldom rose and went back 
to her letter. But the pen fell from her limp fingers, 
and tears stained the already written page. 

The funeral service had only just commenced when 
Vennie reached the churchyard. She remained at the 
extreme outer edge of the crowd, where groups of 
inquisitive women are wont to cluster, wearing their 
aprons and carrying their babies, and where the bigger 
children are apt to be noisy and troublesome. She 



VARIOUS ENCOUNTERS 677 

caught a glimpse of Ninsy Lintot among those stand- 
ing quite close to where Mr. Clavering, in his white 
surplice, was reading the pregnant liturgical words. 
She noticed that the girl held her hands to her face 
and that her slender form was shaking with the stress 
of her emotion. 

She could not see Luke's face, but she was conscious 
that his motionless figure had lost its upright grace. 
The young stone-carver seemed to droop, like a 
sun-flower whose stalk has been bent by the wind. 

The words of the familiar English service were 
borne intermittently to her ears as they fell from the 
lips of the priest who had once been her friend. It 
struck her poignantly enough, — that brave human 
defiance, so solemn and tender, with which humanity 
seems to rise up in sublime desperation and hoist its 
standard of hope against hope! 

She wondered what the sceptical Luke was feeling 
all this while. When Mr. Clavering began to read the 
passage which is prefaced in the Book of Common 
Prayer by the words, "Then while the earth be cast 
upon the Body by some standing by, the priest shall 
say," — the quiet sobs of poor little Ninsy broke 
into a wail of passionate grief, grief to which Vennie, 
for all her convert's aloofness from Protestant heresy, 
could not help adding her own tears. 

It was the custom at Nevilton for the bearers of 
the coffin, when the service was over, to re-form in 
solemn procession, and escort the chief mourners back 
to the house from which they had come. It was her 
knowledge of this custom that led Vennie to steal 
away before the final words were uttered; and her 
hurried departure from the churchyard saved her 



678 WOOD AND STONE 

from being a witness of the somewhat disconcerting 
event with which the solemn transaction closed. 

The bringing of James' body to the church had 
been unfortunately delayed at the start by the 
wayward movements of a luggage-train, which per- 
sisted in shunting up and down over the level-crossing, 
at the moment when they were carrying the coffin from 
the house. This delay had been followed by others, 
owing to various unforeseen causes, and by the time 
the service actually began it was already close upon 
the hour fixed for the confirmation. 

Thus it happened that, soon after Vennie's depar- 
ture, at the very moment when the procession of 
bearers, followed by Luke and the station-master's 
wife, issued forth into the street, there drove up to 
the church-door a two-horsed carriage containing 
Gladys and her mother, the former all whitely veiled, 
as if she were a child-bride. Seeing the bearers troop 
by, the fair-haired candidate for confirmation clutched 
Mrs. Romer's arm and held her in her place, but 
leaning forward in the effort of this movement she 
presented her face at the carriage window, just as 
Luke himself emerged from the gates. 

The two young people found themselves looking 
one another straight in the eyes, until with a shudder- 
ing spasm that shook her whole frame, Gladys sank 
back into her seat, as if from the effect of a crushing 
blow received full upon the breast. 

Luke passed on, following the bearers, with some- 
thing like the ghost of a smile upon his drawn and 
contorted lips. 



CHAPTER XXVII 

VENNIE SELDOM 

IT was not towards her mother's house that 
Vennie directed her steps when she left the 
churchyard. She turned sharp to the west, and 
walked rapidly down the central street of the village 
into the square at the end of it. 

Here she found an arena of busy and stirring 
confusion, dominated by hissing spouts of steam, 
hoarse whistlings from the "roundabout" engines, and 
occasional bursts of extravagant melody, as the 
circus-men made their musical experiments, pending 
the opening of the show. 

Vennie's intention, in crossing the square, was to 
pay a morning visit to Mr. Quincunx, whose absence 
from Andersen's funeral had struck her mind as 
extraordinary and ominous. She feared that the 
recluse must be ill. Nothing less than illness, she 
thought, would have kept him away from such an 
event. She knew how closely he and the younger 
stone-carver were associated, and it was inconceivable 
that any insane jealousy of the dead could have held 
him at home. Of course it was possible that he had 
been compelled to go to work at Yeoborough as usual, 
but she did not think this likely. 

It was, however, not only anxiety lest her mother's 
queer friend should be ill that actuated her. She 
felt, — now that her ultimatum had been delivered, — 



680 WOOD AND STONE 

that the sooner she entered the Catholic Church and 
plunged into her novitiate, the better it would be. 
When events had happened, Mrs. Seldom accepted 
them. It was during the days of uncertain waiting 
that her nerves broke down. Once the daughter 
were actually a postulant in a convent, she felt sure 
the mother would resign herself, and resume her 
normal life. 

Valentia was a very independent and self-sufficient 
woman. With her favourite flowers and her favourite 
biographies of proconsular personages, the girl felt 
convinced she would be much less heart-broken than 
she imagined. 

Her days in Nevilton being thus numbered, Vennie 
could not help giving way to a desire that had lately 
grown more and more definite within her, to have a 
bold and unhesitating interview with Mr. Quincunx. 
Perhaps even at this last hour something might be 
done to save Lacrima from her fate! 

Passing along the outskirts of the circus, she could 
not resist pausing for a moment to observe the numer- 
ous groups of well-known village characters, whom 
curiosity had drawn to the spot. 

She was amazed to catch sight of the redoubtable 
Mr. Wone, holding one of his younger children by 
the hand and surveying with extreme interest the 
setting up of a colossal framework of gilded and 
painted wood, destined to support certain boat- 
shaped swings. She felt a little indignant with the 
worthy man for not having been present at Ander- 
sen's funeral, but the naive and childlike interest with 
which, with open mouth and eyes, he stood gaping at 
this glittering erection, soothed her anger into a 



VENNIE SELDOM 681 

smile. He really was a good sort of man, this poor 
Wone! She wondered vaguely whether he intended 
himself to indulge in the pastime of swinging in a 
boat-shaped swing or whirling round upon a wooden 
horse. She felt that if she could see him on one of 
these roundabouts, — especially if he retained that 
expression of guileless admiration, — she could really 
forgive him everything. 

She caught a glimpse of two other figures whose 
interest in the proceedings appeared extremely vivid, 
no less persons than Mr. John Goring and his de- 
voted henchman, Bert Leerd. These two were 
engaged in reading a glaring advertisement which de- 
picted a young woman clad in astounding spangles 
dancing on a tight-rope, and it was difficult to say 
whether the farmer or the idiot was the more 
absorbed. 

She was just turning away, when she heard her- 
self called by name, and from amid a crowd of women 
clustering round one of Mr. Love's bric-a-brac stalls, 
there came towards her, together, Mrs. Fringe and 
Mrs. Wotnot. 

Vennie was extremely surprised to find these two 
ladies, — by no means particularly friendly as a rule, 
— thus joined in partnership of dissipation, but she 
supposed the influence of a circus, like the influence 
of religion, has a dissolvent effect upon human ani- 
mosity. That these excellent women should have 
preferred the circus, however, to the rival entertain- 
ment in the churchyard, did strike her mind as ex- 
traordinary. She did not know that they had, as a 
matter of fact, "eaten their pot of honey" at the 
one, before proceeding, post-haste, to enjoy the other. 



682 WOOD AND STONE 

"May we walk with you, miss, a step?" suppli- 
cated Mrs. Fringe, as Vennie indicated her intention 
of moving on, as soon as their salutations were 
over. 

"Thank you, you are very kind, Mrs. Fringe. 
Perhaps, — a little way, but I'm rather busy this 
morning." 

"Oh we shan't trouble you long," murmured Mrs. 
Wotnot, "It's only, — well, Mrs. Fringe, here, had 
better speak." 

Thus it came about that Vennie began her advance 
up the Yeoborough road supported by the two house- 
keepers, the lean one on the left of her, and the fat 
one on the right of her. 

"Will I tell her, or will you tell her?" murmured 
the plump lady sweetly, when they were clear of the 
village. 

Mrs. Wotnot made a curious grimace and clasped 
and unclasped her hands. 

"Better you; much, much better, that it should 
be you," she remarked. 

"But 'twas thy tale, dearie; 'twas thy tale and 
surprisin' disco verin's," protested Mrs. Fringe. 

"Those that knows aren't always those that tells," 
observed the other sententiously. 

"But you do think it's proper and right the young 
lady should know?" said Mr. Clavering's housekeeper. 

Mrs. Wotnot nodded. "If 'taint too shameful for 
her, 'tis best what she'd a' ought to hear," said the 
lean woman. 

Vennie became conscious at this moment that 
whenever Mrs. Wotnot opened her mouth there 
issued thence a most unpleasant smell of brandy, and 



VENNIE SELDOM 683 

it flashed upon her that this was the explanation of 
the singular converging of these antipodal orbits. In 
the absence of her master, Mrs. Wotnot had evidently 
"taken to drink," and it was doubtless out of her 
protracted intoxication that Mrs. Fringe had derived 
whatever scandalous piece of gossip it was that she 
was now so anxious to impart. 

"I'll tell 'ee, miss," said Mrs. Fringe, "with no 
nonsense-fangles and no shilly-shally. I'll tell 'ee 
straight out and sober, — same as our dear friend 
did tell it to me. 'Tis along of Miss Romer, — ye 
be to understand, wot is to be confirmed this same 
blessed day. 

"The dear woman, here, was out a-gatherin' laurel- 
leaves one fine evenin', long o' some weeks since, and 
who should she get wind of, in the bushes near-by, 
but Mr. Luke and Miss Gladys. I been my own self 
ere now, moon-daft on that there lovely young man, 
but Satan's ways be Satan's ways, and none shall 
report that I takes countenance of such goings on. 
Mrs. Wotnot here, she heerd every Jack word them 
sinful young things did say, — and shameful-awful 
their words were, God in Heaven do know! 

"They were cursin' one another, like to split, that 
night. She were cryin' and fandanderin' and he 
were laughin' and chaffin'. 'Twas God's terror to hear 
how they went on, with the holy bare sky over their 
shameless heads!" 

"Tell the young lady quick and plain," ejaculated 
Mrs. Wotnot at this point, clutching Vennie's arm 
and arresting their advance. 

"I am 'a tellin' her," retorted Mrs* Fringe, "I'm 
a tellin' as fast as my besom can breathe. Don't 'ee 



684 WOOD AND STONE 

push a body so! The young lady ain't in such a 
tantrum-hurry as all that." 

"I am rather anxious to get on with my walk," 
threw in Vennie, looking from one to another with 
some embarrassment, "and I really don't care very 
much about hearing things of this kind." 

"Tell 'er! Tell 'er! Tell 'er!" cried Mrs. Wotnot. 

Mrs. Fringe cast a contemptuous look at her rival 
house-keeper. 

"Our friend baint quite her own self today, miss," 
she remarked with a wink at Vennie, "the weather 
or summat' 'ave moved 'er rheumatiz from 'er legs, 
and settled it in 'er stummick." 

"Tell her! Tell her!" reiterated the other. 

Mrs. Fringe lowered her voice to a pregnant 
whisper. 

"The truth be, miss, that our friend here heered 
these wicked young things talk quite open-like about 
their gay goings on. So plain did they talk, that 
all wot the Blessed Lord 'is own self do know, of 
such as most folks keeps to 'emselves, went burnin' 
and shamin' into our friend's 'stonished ears. And wot 
she did gather was that Miss Gladys, for certin' and 
sure, be a lost girl, and Mr. Luke 'as 'ad 'is bit of 
fun down to the uttermost drop." 

The extraordinary solemnity with which Mrs. 
Fringe uttered these words and the equally extraor- 
dinary solemnity with which Mrs. Wotnot nodded 
her head in corroboration of their truth had a devas- 
tating effect upon Vennie. There was no earthly 
reason why these two females should have invented 
this squalid story. Mrs. Fringe was an incurable 
scandal-monger, but Vennie had never found her a 



VENNIE SELDOM 685 

liar. Besides there was a genuine note of shocked 
sincerity about her tone which no mere morbid sus- 
picion could have evoked. 

The thing was true then! Gladys and Luke were 
lovers, in the most extreme sense of that word, and 
Dangelis was the victim of an outrageous betrayal. 

Vennie had sufficient presence of mind to avoid the 
eyes of both the women, eyes fixed with ghoulish and 
lickerish interest upon her, as they watched for the 
effect of this revelation, — but she was uncomfortably 
conscious that her cheeks were flaming and her voice 
strained as she bade them good-bye. Comment, of 
any kind, upon what they had revealed to her she 
found absolutely impossible. She could only wish 
them a pleasant time at the circus if they were 
returning thither, and freedom from any ill effects 
due to their accompanying her so far. 

When she was alone, and beginning to climb the 
ascent of Dead Man's Lane, the full implication of 
what she had learnt thrust itself through her brain 
like a red-hot wedge. Vennie's experience of the 
treacherousness of the world had, as we know, gone 
little deeper than her reaction from the rough dis- 
courtesy of Mr. Clavering and the evasive aloofness 
of Mr. Taxater. This sudden revelation into the 
brutishness and squalour inherent in our planetary 
system had the effect upon her of an access of physical 
nausea. She felt dizzy and sick, as she toiled up the 
hill, between the wet sun-pierced hedges, and under 
the heavy September trees. 

The feeling of autumn in the air, so pleasant under 
normal conditions to human senses, seemed to asso- 
ciate itself just now with this dreadful glance she 



686 WOOD AND STONE 

had had into the basic terrors of things. The whole 
atmosphere about her seemed to smell of decay, of 
decomposition, of festering mortality. The pull and 
draw of the thick Nevilton soil, its horrible demonic 
gravitation, had never got hold of her more tena- 
ciously than it did then. She felt as though some 
vast octopus-like tentacles were dragging her earth- 
ward. 

Vennie was one of those rare women for whom, 
even under ordinary conditions, the idea of sex is 
distasteful and repulsive. Presented to her as it was 
now, mingled with treachery and deception, it ob- 
sessed her with an almost living presence. Sensuality 
had always been for her the one unpardonable sin, 
and sensuality of this kind, turning the power of sex 
into a mere motive for squalid pleasure-seeking, filled 
her with a shuddering disgust. 

So this was what men and women were like! This 
was the kind of thing that went On, under the "covert 
and convenient seeming" of affable lies! 

The whole of nature seemed to have become, in 
one moment, foul and miasmic. Rank vapours rose 
from the ground at her feet, and the weeds in the 
hedge took odious and indecent shapes. 

An immense wave of distrust swept over her for 
everyone that she knew. Was Mr. Clavering himself 
like this? 

This thought, — the thought of what, for all she 
could tell, might exist between her priest-friend and 
this harlot-girl, — flushed her cheeks with a new 
emotion. Mixed at that moment with her virginal 
horror of the whole squalid business, was a pang of 
quite a different character, a pang that approached, 



VENNIE SELDOM 687 

if it did not reach, the sharp sting of sheer physical 
jealousy. 

As soon as she became aware of this feeling in 
herself it sickened her with a deeper loathing. Was 
she also contaminated, like the rest? Was no living 
human being free from this taint? 

She stopped and passed her hand across her fore- 
head. She took off her hat and made a movement 
with her arms as if thrusting away some invisible 
assailant. She felt she could not encounter even 
Mr. Quincunx in this obsessed condition. She had 
the sensation of being infected by some kind of 
odious leprosy. 

She sat down in the hedge, heedless of the still 
clinging dew. Strange and desperate thoughts whirled 
through her brain. She longed to purge herself in 
some way, to bathe deep, deep, — body and soul, — 
in some cleansing stream. 

But what about Gladys' betrothed? What about 
the American? Vennie had scarcely spoken to 
Dangelis, hardly ever seen him, but she felt a wave of 
sympathy for the betrayed artist surge through her 
heart. It could not be allowed, — it could not, — that 
those two false intriguers should fool this innocent 
gentleman! 

Struck by a sudden illumination as if from the 
unveiled future, she saw herself going straight to 
Dangelis and revealing the whole story. He should 
at least be made aware of the real nature of the girl 
he was marrying! 

Having resolved upon this bold step, Vennie recov- 
ered something of her natural mood. Where was Mr. 
Dangelis at this moment? She must find that out, — 



688 WOOD AND STONE 

perhaps Mr. Quincunx would know. She must make 
a struggle to waylay the artist, to get an interview 
with him alone. 

She rose to her feet, and holding her hat in her 
hand, advanced resolutely up the lane. She felt 
happier now, relieved, in a measure, of that odious 
sense of confederacy with gross sin which had weighed 
her down. But there still beat vaguely in her brain 
a passionate longing for purification. If only she 
could escape, even for a few hours, from this lust- 
burdened spot! If only she could cool her forehead 
in the sea"! 

As she approached Mr. Quincunx's cottage she ex- 
perienced a calm and restorative reaction from her 
distress of mind. She felt no longer alone in the 
world. Having resolved on a drastic stroke on behalf 
of clear issues, she was strangely conscious, as she 
had not been conscious for many months, of the 
presence, near her and with her, of the Redeemer of 
men. 

It suddenly was borne in upon her that that other 
criminal abuse, which had so long oppressed her soul 
with a dead burden, — the affair of Lacrima and 
Goring, — was intimately associated with what she 
had discovered. It was more than likely that by 
exposing the one she could prevent the other. 

Flushed with excitement at this thought she opened 
Mr. Quincunx's gate and walked up his garden-path. 
To her amazement, she heard voices in the cottage 
and not only voices, but voices speaking in a language 
that vaguely reminded her of the little Catholic 
services in the chapel at Yeoborough. 

Mr. Quincunx himself answered her knock and 



VENNIE SELDOM 689 

opened the door. He was strangely agitated. The hand 
which he extended to her shook as it touched her fingers. 

But Vennie herself was too astonished at the sight 
which met her eyes to notice anything of this. Seated 
opposite one another, on either side of the solitary's 
kitchen-fire, were Lacrima and the little Dolores. 
Vennie had interrupted a lively and impassioned 
colloquy between the two Italians. 

They both rose at her entrance, and their host, 
in hurried nervous speech, gave Vennie an incoherent 
account of what had happened. 

When they were all seated, — Vennie in the little 
girl's chair, and the child on Mr. Quincunx's knees, — 
the embarrassment of the first surprise quickly sub- 
sided. 

"I shall adopt her," the solitary kept repeating, — 
as though the words were uttered in a defiance of 
universal opposition, "I shall adopt her. You'd 
advise me to do that, wouldn't you Miss Seldom? 

"I shall get a proper document made out, so that 
there can be no mistake. I shall adopt her. What- 
ever anyone likes to say, I shall adopt her! 

"Those circus-scoundrels will hold their tongues and 
let me alone for their own sakes. I shall have no 
trouble. Lacrima will explain to the the police who 
the child is, and who her parents were. That is, if 
the police come. But they won't come. Why should 
they come? I shall have a document drawn out." 

It seemed as though the little Neapolitan knew by 
instinct what her protector was saying, for she nestled 
down against his shoulder and taking one of his hands 
in both of hers pressed it against her lips. 

Vennie gazed at Lacrima, and Lacrima gazec 1 



690 WOOD AND STONE 

Vennie, but neither of them spoke. There was an 
inner flame of triumphant concentration in Vennie's 
glance, but Lacrima's look was clouded and sad. 

"Certainly no one will interfere with you," said 
Vennie at last. "We shall all be so glad to think 
that the child is in such good hands. 

"The only difficulty I can see," she paused a mo- 
ment, while the grey eyes of Mr. Quincunx opened 
wide and an expression of something like defiance 
passed over his face, "is that it'll be difficult for you 
to know what to do with her while you are away in 
Yeoborough. You could hardly leave her alone in 
this out-of-the-way place, and I'm afraid our Nevilton 
National School wouldn't suit her at all." 

Mr. Quincunx freed his hand and stroked his beard. 
His fingers were quivering, and Vennie noticed a 
certain curious twitching in the muscles of his face. 

"I shan't go to Yeoborough any more," he cried. 
"None of you need think it! 

"That affair is over and done with. I shan't stay 
here, any more, either, to be bullied by the Romers 
and made a fool of by all these idiots. I shall go 
away. I shall go — far away — to London — to 
Liverpool, — to — to Norwich, — like the Man in the 
Moon!" 

This final inspiration brought a flicker of his old 
goblin-humour to the corners of his mouth. 

Lacrima looked at Vennie with an imperceptible 
lifting of her eyebrows, and then sighed deeply. 

The latter clasped the arms of her high-backed 
chair with firm hands. 

"I think it is essential that you should know where 
you are going, Mr. Quincunx. I mean for the child's 



VENNIE SELDOM 691 

sake. You surely don't wish to drag her aimlessly 
about these great cities while you look for work? 

"Besides, — you won't be angry will you, if I 
speak plainly? — what work, exactly, have you in 
your mind to do? It isn't, I'm afraid, always easy — " 

Mr. Quincunx interrupted her with an outburst of 
unexpected fury. 

"That's what I knew you'd say!" he cried in a 
loud voice. "That's what she says. " He indicated 
Lacrima. "But you both say it, only because you don't 
want me to have the pleasure of adopting Dolores! 

"But I shall adopt her, — in spite of you all. Yes, in 
spite of you all! Nothing shall stop me adopting her!" 

Once more the little Italian nestled close against 
him, and took possession of his trembling hand. 

Vennie perceived an expression of despairing hope- 
lessness pass like an icy mist over Lacrima's face. 

The profile of the Nevilton nun assumed those lines 
of commanding obstinacy which had reminded 
Valentia a few hours ago of the mediaeval baron. 
She rose to her feet. 

"Listen to me, Mr. Quincunx," she said sternly. 
"You are right; you are quite right, to wish to save 
this child. No one shall stop you saving her. No 
one shall stop you adopting her. But there are other 
people whose happiness depends upon what you do, 
besides this child." 

She paused, and glanced from Mr. Quincunx to 
Lacrima, and from Lacrima to Mr. Quincunx. Then 
a look of indescribable domination and power passed 
into her face. She might have been St. Catharine 
herself, magnetizing the whole papal court into 
obedience to her will. 



692 WOOD AND STONE 

"Oh you foolish people!" she cried, "you foolish 
people! Can't you see where God is leading you? 
Can't you see where His Spirit has brought you?" 

She turned upon Mr. Quincunx with shining eyes, 
while Lacrima, white as a phantom and with drooping 
mouth, watched her in amazement. 

"It's not only this child He's helped you to save," 
she went on. "It's not only this child! Are you 
blind to what He means? Don't you understand the 
cruelty that is being done to your friend? Don't 
you understand?" 

She stretched out her arm and touched Mr. Quin- 
cunx's shoulder. 

"You must do more than give this little one a fa- 
ther," she murmured in a low tone, "you must give her 
a mother. How can she be happy without a mother? 

"Come," she went on, in a voice vibrating with 
magnetic authority, "there's no other way. You and 
Lacrima must join hands. You must join hands at 
once, and defy everyone. Our little wanderer must 
have both father and mother! That is what God 
intends." 

There was a long and strange silence, broken only 
by the ticking of the clock. 

Then Mr. Quincunx slowly rose, allowed the child 
to sink down into his empty chair, and crossed over 
to Lacrima's side. Very solemnly, and as if registering 
a sacred vow, he took his friend's head between his 
hands and kissed her on the forehead. Then, search- 
ing for her hand and holding it tightly in his own, he 
turned towards Vennie, while Lacrima herself, pressing 
her face against his shabby coat, broke into convulsive 
crying. 



VENNIE SELDOM 693 

"I'll take your advice," he said gravely. "I'll 
take it without question. There are more difficulties 
in the way than you know, but I'll do, — we'll do, 
— just what you tell us. I can't think — " he hesi- 
tated for a moment, while a curious smile flickered 
across his face, "how on earth I'm going to manage. 
I can't think how we're going to get away from here. 
But I'll take your advice and we'll do exactly as 
you say. 

"We'll do what she says, won't we, Lacrima?" 

Lacrima's only answer was to conceal her face still 
more completely in his dusty coat, but her crying 
became quieter and presently ceased altogether. 

At that moment there came a sharp knock a the 
door. 

The countenance of Mr. Quincunx changed. He 
dropped his friend's hand, and moved into the centre 
of the room. 

"That must be the circus-people," he whispered. 
"They've come for Dolores. You'll support me won't 
you?" He looked imploringly at Vennie. "You'll 
tell them they can't have her — that I refuse to give 
her up — that I'm going to adopt her?" 

He went out and opened the door. 

It was not the circus-men he found waiting on his 
threshold. Nor was it the police. It was only one 
of the under-gardeners from Nevilton House. The 
youth explained that Mr. Romer had sent him to fetch 
Lacrima. 

"They be goin' to lunch early, mistress says, and 
the young lady 'ave to come right along 'ome wi' I." 

Vennie intervened at this moment between her 
agitated host and the intruder. 



694 WOOD AND STONE 

"I'll bring Miss Traffio home," she said sternly, 
"when she's ready to come. You may go back and 
tell Mrs. Romer that she's with me, — with Miss 
Seldom." 

The youth touched his hat, and slouched off, 
without further protest. 

Vennie, returning into the kitchen, found Mr. 
Quincunx standing thoughtfully by the mantel-piece, 
stroking his beard, and the two Italians engaged in 
an excited conversation in their own tongue. 

The descendant of the lords of Nevilton meditated 
for a moment with drooping head, her hands char- 
acteristically clasped behind her back. When she 
lifted up her chin and began to speak, there was the 
same concentrated light in her eyes and the same 
imperative tone in her voice. 

"The thing for us to do," she said, speaking hur- 
riedly but firmly, "is to go — all four of us — straight 
away from here! I'm not going to leave you until 
things are settled. I'm going to get you all clean 
out of this, — clean away!" 

She paused and looked at Lacrima. "Where's Mr. 
Dangelis?" she asked. 

Lacrima explained how the artist had written to 
Gladys that he was staying until the following day at 
the Gloucester Hotel in Weymouth. 

Vennie's face became radiant when she heard this. 
"Ah!" she cried, "God is indeed fighting for us! 
It's Dangelis that I must see, and see at once. Where 
better could we all go, — at any rate for tonight — 
than to Weymouth? We'll think later what must be 
done next. Dangelis will help us. I'm perfectly 
certain he'll help us. 



VENNIE SELDOM 695 

"Oh yes, we'll go to Weymouth at once, — before 
there's any risk of the Romers stopping us! We'll 
walk to Yeoborough — that'll give us time to think 
out our plans — and take the train from there. 

"I'll send a telegram to my mother late tonight, 
when there's no chance of her communicating with 
the House. As to being seen in Yeoborough by any 
Nevilton people, we must risk that! God has been 
so good to us today that I can't believe He won't 
go on being good to us. 

"Oh what a relief it'll be, — what a relief, — to get 
away from Nevilton! And I shall be able to dip my 
hands in the sea!" 

While these rapid utterances fell from Vennie's 
excited lips, the face of Mr. Quincunx was a wonder 
to look upon. It was the crisis of his days, and he 
displayed his knowledge that it was so by more 
convulsive changes of expression, than perhaps, in 
an equal stretch of time, had ever crossed the visage 
of a mortal man. 

"We'll take your advice," he said, at last, with 
immense solemnity. 

Lacrima looked at him wistfully. Her face was 
very pale and her lips trembled. 

"It isn't only because of the child, is it, that he's 
ready to go?" she murmured, clutching at Vennie's 
arm, as Mr. Quincunx retired to make his brief 
preparations. "I shouldn't like to think it was only 
that. But he is fond of me. He is fond of me!" 



CHAPTER XXVIII 
LODMOOR 

IT was Mr. Quincunx who had to find the money 
for their bold adventure. Neither Vennie nor 
Lacrima could discover a single penny on their 
persons. Mr. Quincunx produced it from the bottom 
of an old jam-pot placed in the interior recesses of 
one of his deepest cupboards. He displayed to his 
three friends, with not a little pride, the sum he was 
possessed of, — no less in fact than five golden 
sovereigns. 

Their walk to Yeoborough was full of thrilling little 
excitements. Three times they concealed themselves 
on the further side of the hedge, to let certain sus- 
picious pedestrians, who might be Nevilton people, 
pass by unastonished. 

Once well upon their way, they all four felt a 
strange sense of liberation and expansion. The little 
Neapolitan walked between Mr. Quincunx and Lac- 
rima, a hand given to each, and her childish high 
spirits kept them all from any apprehensive brooding. 

Once and once only, they looked back, and Mr. 
Quincunx shook his fist at the two distant hills. 

"You are right," he remarked to Vennie, "it's the 
sea we're in want of. These curst inland fields have 
the devil in their heavy mould." 

They found themselves, when they reached the 
town, with an hour to spare before their train started, 



LODMOOR 697 



and entering a little dairy-shop near the station, 
they refreshed themselves with milk and bread-and- 
butter. Here Mr. Quincunx and the child waited 
in excited expectation, while the two girls went 
out to make some necessary purchases — returning 
finally, in triumph, with a light wicker-work suit- 
case, containing all that they required for several days 
and nights. 

They were in the train at last, with a compartment 
to themselves, and, as far as they could tell, quite 
undiscovered by anyone who knew them. 

Vennie had hardly ever in her life enjoyed anything 
more than she enjoyed that journey. She felt that 
the stars were fighting on her side or, to put it in 
terms of her religion, that God Himself was smoothing 
the road in front of her. 

She experienced a momentary pang when the train, 
at last, passing along the edge of the backwater, 
ran in to Weymouth Station. It was so sweet, so 
strangely sweet, to know that three living souls 
depended upon her for their happiness, for their 
escape from the power of the devil! Would she feel 
like this, would she ever feel quite like this, when 
the convent-doors shut her away from this exciting 
world? 

They emerged from the crowded station, — Mr. 
Quincunx carrying the wicker-work suit-case — and 
made their way towards the Esplanade. 

The early afternoon sun lay hot upon the pave- 
ments, but from the sea a strong fresh wind was 
blowing. Both the girls shivered a little in their 
thin frocks, and as the red shawl of the young Italian 
had already excited some curiosity among the passers- 



698 WOOD AND STONE 

by, they decided to enter one of the numerous drapery 
shops, and spend some more of Mr. Quincunx's 
money. 

They were so long in the shop that the nervous 
excitement of the recluse was on the point of changing 
into nervous irritation, when at last they reappeared. 
But he was reconciled to the delay when he perceived 
the admirable use they had made of it. 

All three were wearing long tweed rain-cloaks of 
precisely the same tint of sober grey. They looked 
like three sisters, newly arrived from some neighbour- 
ing inland town, — Dorchester, perhaps, or Sherborne, 
— with a view to spending a pleasant afternoon at 
the sea-side. Not only were they all wrapped in 
the same species of cloak. They had purchased three 
little woollen caps of a similar shade, such things as 
it would have been difficult to secure in any shop 
but a little unfashionable one, where summer and 
winter vogues casually overlapped. 

Mr. Quincunx, whose exaltation of mood had not 
made him forget to bring his own overcoat with him, 
now put this on, and warmly and comfortably clad, 
the four fugitives from Nevilton strolled along the 
Esplanade in the direction of St. John's church. 

To leave his three companions free to run down to 
the sea's edge, Mr. Quincunx possessed himself of 
the clumsy paper parcels containing the hats they 
had relinquished and also of the little girl's red shawl, 
and resting on a seat with these objects piled up by 
his side he proceeded to light a cigarette and gaze 
placidly about him. The worst of his plunge into 
activity being over, — for, whatever happened, the 
initial effort was bound to be the worst, — the wanderer 



LODMOOR 699 



from Dead Man's Lane chuckled to himself with 
bursts of cynical humour as he contemplated the 
situation they were in. 

But what a relief it was to see the clear-shining 
foam-sprinkled expanse of water lying spread out 
before him! Like the younger Andersen, Mr. Quin- 
cunx had a passionate love of Weymouth, and never 
had he loved it more than he did at that moment! 
He greeted the splendid curve of receding cliffs — 
the White Nore and St. Alban's head — with a sigh 
of profound satisfaction, and he looked across to the 
massive bulk of Portland, as though in its noble 
uncrumbling stone — stone that was so much nearer 
to marble than to clay — there lurked some occult 
talisman ready to save him from everything connected 
with Leo's Hill. 

Yes, the sea was what he wanted just then! How 
well the salt taste of it, the smell of its sun-bleached 
stranded weeds, its wide horizons, its long-drawn 
murmur, blent with the strange new mood into which 
that morning's events had thrown him! 

How happy the little Dolores looked, between 
Lacrima and Vennie, her dark curls waving in the 
wind from beneath her grey cap! 

All at once his mind reverted to James Andersen, 
lying now alone and motionless, under six feet of 
yellow clay. Mr. Quincunx shivered. After all it 
was something to be alive still, something to be still 
able to stroke one's beard and stretch one's legs, 
and fumble in one's pocket for a "Three Castles" 
cigarette! 

He wondered vaguely how and when this young 
St. Catharine of theirs intended to marry him to 



700 WOOD AND STONE 

Lacrima. And then what? Would he have to work 
frightfully, preposterously hard? 

He chuckied to himself to think how blank Mr. 
Romer would look, when he found that both his 
victims had been spirited away in one breath. What 
a girl this Vennie Seldom was! 

He tried to imagine what it would be like, this 
business of being married. After all, he was very 
fond of Lacrima. He hoped that dusky wavy hair 
of hers were as long as it suggested that it was! He 
liked girls to have long hair. 

Would she bring him his tea in the morning, 
sometimes, with bare arms and bare feet? Would 
she sit cross-legged at the foot of his bed, while he 
drank it, and chatter to him of what they would do 
when he came back from his work? 

His work! That was an aspect of the affair which 
certainly might well be omitted. 

And then, as he stared at the three girlish figures 
on the beach, there came over him the strange illusion 
that both Vennie and Lacrima were only dream- 
people — unreal and fantastic — and that the true 
living persons of his drama were himself and his little 
Neapolitan waif. 

Suppose the three girls were to take a boat — one 
of those boats whose painted keels he saw glittering 
now so pleasantly on the beach — and row out into 
the water. And suppose the boat were upset and 
both Vennie and Lacrima drowned? Would he be 
so sad to have to live the rest of his life alone with 
the little Dolores? 

Perhaps it would be better if this event occurred 
after Vennie had helped him to secure some work to 



LODMOOR 701 



do — some not too hard work ! Well — Vennie, at 
any rate, was going to be drowned in a certain sense, 
at least she was meditating entering a convent, and 
that was little different from being drowned, or being 
buried in yellow clay, like James Andersen! 

But Lacrima was not meditating entering a con- 
vent. Lacrima was meditating being married to 
him, and being a mother to their adopted child. He 
hoped she would be a gentle mother. If she were 
not, if she ever spoke crossly to Dolores, he would 
lose his temper. He would lose his temper so much 
that he would tremble from head to foot! He called 
up an imaginary scene between them, a scene so 
vivid that he found himself trembling now, as his 
hand rested upon the paper parcel. 

But perhaps, if by chance they left England and 
went on a journey, — Witch-Bessie had found a 
journey, "a terrible journey," in the lines of his 
hand, — Lacrima would catch a fever in some foreign 
city, and he and Dolores would be left alone, quite 
as alone as if she were drowned today! 

But perhaps it would be he, Maurice Quincunx, 
who would catch the fever. No! He did not like 
these "terrible journeys." He preferred to sit on a 
seat on Weymouth Esplanade and watch Dolores 
laughing and running into the sea and picking up 
shells. 

The chief thing was to be alive, and not too tired, 
or too cold, or too hungry, or too harassed by inso- 
lent aggressive people! How delicious a thing life 
could be if it were only properly arranged! If cruelty, 
and brutality, and vulgarity, and office-work, were 
removed ! 



702 WOOD AND STONE 

He could never be cruel to anyone. From that 
worst sin, — if one could talk of such a thing as sin 
in this mad world, — his temperament entirely saved 
him. He hoped when they were married that Lac- 
rima would not want him to be too sentimental 
about her. And he rather hoped that he would still 
have his evenings to himself, to turn over the pages 
of Rabelais, when he had kissed Dolores good night. 

His meditations were interrupted at this point by 
the return of his companions, who came scrambling 
across the shingle, threading their way among the 
boats, laughing and talking merrily, and trailing long 
pieces of sea-weed in their hands. 

Vennie announced that since it was nearly four 
o'clock it would be advisable for them to secure their 
lodging for the night, and when that was done she 
would leave them to their own devices for an hour 
or two, while she proceeded to the Gloucester Hotel 
to have her interview with Ralph Dangelis. 

Their various sea-spoils being all handed over to 
the excited little foundling, they walked slowly along 
the Esplanade, still bearing to the east, while they 
surveyed the appearance of the various "crescents," 
"terraces," and "rows" on the opposite side of the 
street. It was not till they arrived at the very end 
of these, that Vennie, who had assumed complete 
responsibility for their movements, piloted them 
across the road. 

The houses they now approached were entitled 
"Brunswick Terrace," and they entirely fulfilled their 
title by suggesting, in the pleasant liberality of their 
bay-windows and the mellow dignity of their well- 
proportioned fronts, the sort of solid comfort which 



LODMOOR 703 



the syllables "Brunswick" seem naturally to convey. 
They began their enquiries for rooms, about five 
doors from the end of the terrace, but it was not till 
they reached the last house, — the last except two 
reddish-coloured ones of later date, — that they 
found what they wanted. 

It was arranged that the two Italians should share 
a room together. Vennie elected to sleep in a small 
apartment adjoining theirs, while Mr. Quincunx was 
given a front-room, looking out on the sea, on the 
third floor. 

Vennie smiled to herself as she thought how amazed 
her mother would have been could she have seen her 
at that moment, as she helped Lacrima to unpack 
their solitary piece of luggage, while Mr. Quincunx 
smoked cigarettes in the balcony of the window! 

She left them finally in the lodging-house parlour, 
seated on a horse-hair sofa, watching the prim land- 
lady preparing tea. Vennie refused to wait for this 
meal, being anxious — she said — to get her interview 
with the American well over, for until that moment 
had been reached, she could neither discuss their 
future plans calmly, nor enjoy the flavour of the 
adventure. 

When Vennie had left them, and the three were all 
comfortably seated round the table, Mr. Quincunx 
found Lacrima in so radiant a mood that he began 
to feel a little ashamed of his ambiguous meditations 
on the Esplanade. She was, after all, quite beauti- 
ful in her way, — though, of course, not as beautiful 
as the young Neapolitan, whose eyes had a look in 
them, even when she was happy, which haunted one 
and filled one with vague indescribable emotions. 



704 WOOD AND STONE 

Mr. Quincunx himself was in the best of spirits. 
His beard wagged, his nostrils quivered, his wit 
flowed. Lacrima fixed her eyes upon him with de- 
lighted appreciation, — and led him on and on, 
through a thousand caprices of fancy. The poor 
Pariah's heart was full of exquisite happiness. She 
felt like one actually liberated from the tomb. For 
the first time since she had known anything of Eng- 
land she was able to breathe freely and spontaneously 
and be her natural self. 

For some queer reason or other, her thoughts kept 
reverting to James Andersen, but reverting to him 
with neither sadness nor pity. She felt no remorse 
for not having been present when he was buried that 
morning. She did not feel as though he were buried. 
She did not feel as though he were dead. She felt, 
in some strange way, that he had merely escaped from 
the evil spells of Nevilton, and that in the power of 
his new strength he was the cause of her own 
emancipation. 

And what an emancipation it was ! It was like sud- 
denly becoming a child again — a child with power 
to enjoy the very things that children so often miss. 

Everything in this little parlour pleased her. The 
blue vases on the mantelpiece containing dusty 
"everlasting flowers," the plush-framed portraits of 
the landlady's deceased parents, enlarged to a magni- 
tude of shadowy dignity by some old-fashioned 
photographic process, the quaint row of minute 
china elephants that stood on a little bracket in the 
corner, the glaring antimacassar thrown across the 
back of the armchair, the sea-scents and sea- murmurs 
floating in through the window, the melodious crying 



LODMOOR 705 



of a fish-pedler in the street; all these things thrilled 
her with a sense of freedom and escape, which over- 
brimmed her heart with happiness. 

What matter, after all, she thought, that her little 
compatriot with the wonderful eyes had been the 
means of arousing her friend from his inertia! Her 
long acquaintance with Mr. Quincunx had mellowed 
her affection for him into a tenderness that was 
almost maternal. She could even find it in her to 
be glad that she was to be saved from the burden of 
struggling alone with his fits of melancholia. With 
Dolores to keep him amused, and herself to look after 
his material wants, it seemed probable that, what- 
ever happened, the dear man would be happier than 
he had ever dreamed of being! 

The uncertainty of their future weighed upon her 
very little. She had the true Pariah tendency to 
lie back with arms outstretched upon the great tide, 
and let it carry her whither it pleased. She had done 
this so long, while the tide was dark and evil, that 
to do it where the waters gleamed and shone was a 
voluptuous delight. 

While her protegees were thus enjoying themselves 
Vennie sought out and entered, with a resolute bear- 
ing, the ancient Gloucester Hotel. The place had 
recently been refitted according to modern notions 
of comfort, but in its general lines, and in a certain 
air it had of liberal welcoming, it preserved the 
Georgian touch. 

She was already within the hall-way when, led by an 
indefinable impulse to look back, she caught sight of 
Dangelis himself walking rapidly along the Esplanade 
towards the very quarter from which she had just 



706 WOOD AND STONE 

come. Without a moment's hesitation she ran down 
the steps, crossed the road and followed him. 

The American seemed to be inspired by some mania 
for fast walking that afternoon. Vennie was quite 
breathless before she succeeded in approaching him, 
and she did not manage to do this until they were 
both very nearly opposite Brunswick Terrace. 

Just here she was unwilling to make herself known, 
as her friends might at any moment emerge from their 
lodging. She preferred to follow the long strides of 
the artist still further, till, in fact he had led her, 
hot and exhausted in her new cloak, quite beyond the 
limits of the houses. 

Where the town ceases, on this eastern side, a long 
white dusty road leads across a mile or two of level 
ground before the noble curve of cliffs ending in St. 
Albans Head has its beginning. This road is bounded 
on one hand by a high bank of shingle and on the 
other by a wide expanse of salt-marshes known in 
that district under the name of Lodmoor. It was 
not until the American had emerged upon this soli- 
tary road that his pursuer saw fit to bring him to 
a halt. 

"Mr. Dangelis!" she called out, "Mr. Dangelis!" 

He swung round in astonishment at hearing his 
name. For the first moment he did not recognize 
Vennie. Her newly purchased attire, — not to speak 
of her unnaturally flushed cheeks, — had materially 
altered her appearance. When she held out her hand, 
however, and stopped to take breath, he realized 
who she was. 

"Oh Mr. Dangelis," she gasped, "I've been follow- 
ing you all the way from the Hotel. I so want to 



LODMOOR 707 



talk to you. You must listen to me. It's very, very 
important!" 

He held his hat in his hand, and regarded her with 
smiling amazement. 

"Well, Miss Seldom, you are an astonishing person. 
Is you mother here? Are you staying at Weymouth? 
How did you catch sight of me? Certainly — by all 
means — tell me your news ! I long to hear this thing 
that's so important." 

He made as if he would return with her to the 
town, but she laid her hand on his arm. 

"No — no! let's walk on quietly here. I can talk 
to you better here." 

The roadway, however, proved so disconcerting, 
owing to great gusts of wind which kept driving the 
sand and dust along its surface, that before Vennie had 
summoned up courage to begin her story, they found 
it necessary to debouch to their left and enter the 
marshy flats of Lodmoor. They took their way along 
the edge of a broad ditch, whose black peat-bottomed 
waters were overhung by clumps of "Michaelmas 
daisies" and sprinkled with weird glaucous-leafed 
plants. It was a place of a singular character, owing 
to the close encounter in it of land and sea, and it 
seemed to draw the appeal of its strange desolation 
almost equally from both these sources. 

Vennie, on the verge of speaking, found her senses 
in a state of morbid alertness. Everything she felt 
and saw at that moment lodged itself with poignant 
sharpness in her brain and returned to her mind long 
afterwards. So extreme was her nervous tension that 
she found it difficult to disentangle her thoughts from 
all these outward impressions. 



708 WOOD AND STONE 

The splash of a water-rat became an episode in 
her suspended revelation. The bubbles rising from 
the movements of an eel in the mud got mixed with 
the image of Mrs. Wotnot picking laurel-leaves. The 
flight of a sea-gull above their heads was a projection 
of Dangelis' escape from the spells of his false mis- 
tress. The wind shaking the reeds was the breath of 
her fatal news ruffling the man's smiling attention. 
The wail of the startled plovers was the cry of her own 
heart, calling upon all the spirits of truth and justice, 
to make him believe her words. 

She told him at last, — told him everything, walking 
slowly by his side with her eyes cast down and her 
hands clasped tight behind her. 

When she had finished, there was an immense 
intolerable silence, and slowly, very slowly, she 
permitted her glance to rise to her companion's 
face, to grasp the effect of her narration upon 
him. 

How rare it is that these world-shaking revelations 
produce the impression one has anticipated! To 
Vennie's complete amazement, — ■ and even, it must 
be allowed, a little to her dismay, — Dangelis regarded 
her with a frank untroubled smile. 

"You, — I — " she stammered, and stopped 
abruptly. Then, before he could answer her, "I 
didn't know you knew all this. Did you really know 
it, — and not mind? Don't people mind these things 
in — in other countries?" 

Dangelis spoke at last. "Oh, yes of course, we 
mind as much as any of you; that is to say, if we 
do mind, — but you must remember, Miss Seldom, 
there are circumstances, situations, — there are, in 



LODMOOR 709 



fact feelings, — which make these things sometimes 
rather a relief than otherwise!" 

He threw up his stick in the air, as he spoke, and 
caught it as it descended. 

"Pardon me, one moment, I want — I want to 
see if I can jump this ditch." 

He threw both stick and hat on the ground, and 
to Vennie's complete amazement, stepped back a 
pace or two, and running desperately to the brink 
of the stream cleared it with a bound. He repeated 
this manoeuvre from the further bank, and returned, 
breathing hard and fast, to the girl's side. 

Picking up his hat and stick, he uttered a wild 
series of barbaric howls, such howls as Vennie had 
never, in her life, heard issuing from the mouth of 
man or beast. Had Gladys' treachery turned his 
brain? 

But no madman could possibly have smiled the 
friendly boyish smile with which he greeted her when 
this performance was over. 

"So sorry if I scared you," he said. "Do you 
know what that is? It's our college 'y e h\' It's what 
we do at base-ball matches." 

Vennie thought he was going to do it again, and in 
her apprehension she laid a hand on his sleeve. 

"But don't you really mind Miss Romer's being like 
this? Did you know she was like this?' she enquired. 

"Don't let's think about her any more," cried the 
artist. "I don't care what she's like, now I can get 
rid of her. To tell you the honest truth, Miss Sel- 
dom, I'd come down here for no other reason than 
to think over this curst hole I've got myself into, 
and to devise some way out. 



710 WOOD AND STONE 

" What you tell me, — and I believe every word of 
it, I want to believe every word of it! — just gives 
me the excuse I need. Good-bye, Miss Gladys! 
Good-bye, Ariadne! 'Ban-ban, Ca-Caliban, Have a 
new master, get a new man!' No more engagements 
for me, dear Miss Seldom! I'm a free lance now, a 
free lance, — henceforward and forever!" 

The exultant artist was on the point of indulging 
once more in his college yell, but the scared and 
bewildered expression on Vennie's face saved her from 
a second experience of that phenomenon. 

"Shall I tell you what I was thinking of doing, 
as I strolled along the Front this afternoon?" 

Vennie nodded, unable to repress a smile as she re- 
membered the difficulty she had in arresting this stroll. 

"I was thinking of taking the boat for the Channel 
Islands tomorrow! I even went so far as to make 
enquiries about the time it started. What do you 
think of that?" 

Vennie thought it was extremely singular, and she 
also thought that she had never heard the word 
"enquiries" pronounced in just that way. 

"It leaves quite early, at nine in the morning. And 
it's some boat, — T can tell you that!" 

"Well," continued Vennie, recovering by degrees 
that sense of concentrated power which had accom- 
panied her all day, "what now? Are you still going 
to sail by it?" 

"That's — a — large — proposition," answered her 
interlocutor slowly. "I — I rather think I am!" 

One effect of his escape from his Nevilton enchant- 
ress seemed to be an irrepressible tendency to relapse 
into the American vernacular. 



LODMOOR 711 



They continued advancing along the edge of the 
ditch, side by side. 

Vennie plunged into the matter of Lacrima and 
Mr. Quincunx. 

She narrated all she knew of this squalid and sin- 
ister story. She enlarged upon the two friends' long 
devotion to one another. She pictured the wickedness 
and shame of the projected marriage with John 
Goring. Finally she explained how it had come about 
that both Mr. Romer's slaves, and with them the 
little circus-waif, were at that moment in Weymouth. 

"And so you've carried them off?" cried the Artist 
in high glee. "Bless my soul, but I admire you for 
it! And what are you going to do with them now?" 

Vennie looked straight into his eyes. "That is 
where I want your help, Mr. Dangelis!" 

It was late in the evening before the citizen of 
Toledo, Ohio, and the would-be Postulant of the 
Sacred Heart parted from one another opposite the 
Jubilee Clock. 

A reassuring telegram had been sent to Mrs. Seldom 
announcing Vennie's return in the course of the fol- 
lowing day. 

As for the rest, all had been satisfactorily arranged. 
The American had displayed overpowering generosity. 
He seemed anxious to do penance for his obsession 
by the daughter, by lavishing benefactions upon the 
victims of the father. Perhaps it seemed to him that 
this was the best manner of paying back the debt, 
which his aesthetic imagination owed to the suggestive 
charms of the Nevilton landscape. 

He made himself, in a word, completely responsible 
for the three wanderers. He would carry them off 



712 WOOD AND STONE 

with him to the Channel Isles, and either settle them 
down there, or make it possible for them to cross 
thence to France, and from France, if so they pleased, 
on to Lacrima's home in Italy. He would come to 
an arrangement with his bankers to have handed over 
definitely to Mr. Quincunx a sum that would once 
and for all put him into a position of financial 
security. 

"I'd have paid a hundred times as much as that," 
he laughingly assured Vennie, "to have got clear of 
my mix-up with that girl." 

Thus it came about that at nine o'clock on the day 
which followed the burial of James Andersen, Vennie, 
standing on the edge of the narrow wharf, between 
railway-trucks and hawsers, watched the ship with the 
red funnels carry off the persons who — under Heaven 
— were the chief cause of the stone-carver's death. 

As the four figures, waving to her over the ship's 
side grew less and less distinct, Vennie felt an extra- 
ordinary and unaccountable desire to burst into a fit 
of passionate weeping. She could not have told why 
she wept, nor could she have told whether her tears 
were tears of relief or of desolation, but something in 
the passing of that brightly-painted ship round the 
corner of the little break-water, gave her a different 
emotion from any she had ever known in her life. 

When at last she turned her back to the harbour, 
she asked the way to the nearest Catholic Church, 
but in place of following the directions given her, she 
found herself seated on the shingles below Brunswick 
Terrace, watching the in-drawing and out-flowing 
waves. 

How strange this human existence was! Long after 



LODMOOR 713 



the last block of Leonian stone had been removed 
from its place — long after the stately pinnacles of 
Nevilton House had crumbled into shapeless ruins, — 
long after the memory of all these people's troubles 
had been erased and forgotten, — this same tide would 
fling itself upon this same beach, and its voice then 
would be as its voice now, restless, unsatisfied, 
unappeased. 



CHAPTER XXIX 
THE GOAT AND BOY 

IT was the middle of October. Francis Taxater 
and Luke Andersen sat opposite one another 
over a beer-stained table in the parlour of the 
Goat and Boy. The afternoon was drawing to its 
close and the fire in the little grate threw a warm 
ruddy light through the darkening room. 

Outside the rain was falling, heavily, persistently, — 
the sort of rain that by long-continued importunity 
finds its way through every sort of obstacle. For 
nearly a month this rain had lasted. It had come in 
with the equinox, and Heaven knew how long it was 
going to stay. It had so thoroughly drenched all 
the fields, woods, lanes, gardens and orchards of 
Nevilton, that a palpable atmosphere of charnel-. 
house chilliness pervaded everything. Into this 
atmosphere the light sank at night like a thing 
drowned in deep water, and into this atmosphere the 
light rose at dawn like something rising from beneath 
the sea. 

The sun itself, as a definite presence, had entirely 
disappeared. It might have fallen into fathomless 
space, for all the visible signs it gave of its existence. 
The daylight seemed a pallid entity, diffused through 
the lower regions of the air, unconnected with any 
visible fount of life or warmth. 

The rain seemed to draw forth from the earth all 



THE GOAT AND BOY 715 

the accumulated moisture of centuries of damp 
autumns, while between the water below the firma- 
ment and the water above the firmament, — between 
the persistent deluge from the sky and the dampness 
exuded from the earth, — the death-stricken multi- 
tudinous leaves of Nevilton drifted to their morgue 
in the cart-ruts and ditches. 

The only object in the vicinity whose appearance 
seemed to suffer no change from this incursion of 
many waters was Leo's Hill. Leo's Hill looked as 
if it loved the rain, and the rain looked as if it loved 
Leo's Hill. In no kind of manner were its familiar 
outlines affected, except perhaps in winning a certain 
added weight, by reason of the fact that its rival 
Mount had been stripped of its luxuriant foliage. 

"So our dear Mr. Romer has got his Freight Bill 
through," said Luke, sipping his glass of whiskey 
and smiling at Mr. Taxater. "He at any rate then 
won't be worried by this rain." 

"I'm to dine with him tomorrow," answered the 
papal champion, "so I shall have an opportunity of 
discovering what he's actually gained by this." 

"I wish I'd had James cremated," muttered Luke, 
staring at the fire-place, into which the rain fell down 
the narrow chimney. 

Mr. Taxater crossed himself. 

"What do you really feel," enquired the younger 
man abruptly, "about the chances in favour of a life 
after death?" 

"The Church," answered Mr. Taxater, stirring his 
rum and sugar with a spoon, "could hardly be 
expected to formulate a dogma denying such a hope. 
The true spirit of her attitude towards it may per- 



716 WOOD AND STONE 

haps be best understood in the repetition of her 
requiem prayer, 'Save us from eternal death!' We 
none of us want eternal death, my friend, though 
many of us are very weary of this particular life. I 
do not know that I am myself, however. But that 
may be due to the fact that I am a real sceptic. To 
love life, Andersen, one cannot be too sceptical." 

"Upon my soul I believe you!" answered the stone- 
carver, "but I cannot quite see how you can make 
claim to that title." 

"You're not a philosopher my friend," said Mr. 
Taxater, leaning his elbows on the table and fixing 
a dark but luminous eye upon his interlocutor. 

"If you were a philosopher you would know that 
to be a true sceptic it is necessary to be a Catholic. 
You, for instance, aren't a sceptic, and never can be. 
You're a dogmatic materialist. You doubt everything 
in the world except doubt. I doubt doubt." 

Luke rose and poked the fire. 

"I'm afraid my little Annie'll be frightfully wet," 
he remarked, "when she gets home tonight. I wish 
that last train from Yeoborough wasn't quite so late." 

"Do you propose to go down to the station to 
meet her?" enquired Mr. Taxater. 

Luke sighed. "I suppose so," he said. "That's the 
worst of being married. There's always something 
or other interfering with the main purpose of life." 

"May I ask what the main purpose of life may be?" 
said the theologian. 

"Talking with you, of course," replied the young 
man smiling; "talking with any friend. Oh damn! I 
can't tell you how I miss going up to Dead Man's 
Cottage." 



THE GOAT AND BOY 717 

"Yes," said the great scholar meditatively, "women 
are bewitching creatures, especially when they're very 
young or very old, but they aren't exactly arresting 
in conversation." 

Luke became silent, meditating on this. 

"They throw out little things now and then," he 
said. "Annie does. But they've no sense of propor- 
tion. If they're happy they're thrilled by everything, 
and if they're unhappy, — well, you know how it is! 
They don't bite at the truth, for the sake of biting, 
and they never get to the bone. They just lick the 
gloss of things with the tips of their tongues. And 
they quiver and vibrate so, you never know where 
they are, or what they've got up their sleeve that 
tickles them." 

Mr. Taxater lifted his glass to his mouth and care- 
fully replaced it on the table. There was something 
in this movement of his plump white fingers which 
always fascinated Luke. Mr. Taxater's hands looked 
as though, beyond the pen and the wine-cup, they never 
touched any earthly object. 

"Have you heard any more of Philip Wone?" 
enquired the stone-carver. 

The theologian shook his head. "I'm afraid, 
since he went up to London, he's really got entangled 
in these anarchist plots." 

"I'm not unselfish enough to be an anarchist," 
said Luke, "but I sympathize with their spirit. The 
sort of people I can't stand are these Christian Social- 
ists. What really pleases me, I suppose, is the notion 
of a genuine aristocracy, an aristocracy as revolu- 
tionary as anarchists in their attitude to morals and 
such things, an aristocracy that's flung up out of 



718 WOOD AND STONE 

this mad world, as a sort of exquisite flower of chance 
and accident, an aristocracy that is worth all this 
damned confusion!" 

Mr. Taxater smiled. It always amused him when 
Luke Andersen got excited in this way, and began 
catching his breath and gesticulating. He seemed 
to have heard these remarks on other occasions. He 
regarded them as a signal that the stone-carver had 
drunk more whiskey than was good for him. When 
completely himself Luke talked of girls and of death. 
When a little depressed he abused either Noncon- 
formists or Socialists. When in the early stages of 
intoxication he eulogized the upper classes. 

"It's a pity," said the theologian, "that Ninsy 
couldn't bring herself to marry that boy. There's 
something morbid in the way she talks. I met her 
in Nevil's Gully yesterday, and I had quite a long 
conversation with her." 

Luke looked sharply at him. "Have you yourself 
ever seen her, across there?" he asked making a 
gesture in the direction of the churchyard. 

Mr. Taxater shook his head. "Have you?" he 
demanded. 

Luke nodded. 

A sudden silence fell upon them. The rain beat in 
redoubled fury upon the window, and they could 
hear it pattering on the roof and falling in a heavy 
stream from the pipe above the eaves. 

The younger man felt as though some tragic intima- 
tion, uttered in a tongue completely beyond the reach 
of both of them, were beating about for entry, at 
closed shutters. 

Mr. Taxater felt no sensation of this kind. "Non 



THE GOAT AND BOY 719 

est reluctandum cum Deo" were the sage words with 
which he raised his glass to his lips. 

Luke remained motionless staring at the window, 
and thinking of a certain shrouded figure, with hollow 
cheeks and crossed hands, to whom this rain was 
nothing, and less than nothing. 

Once more there was silence between them, as 
though a flock of noiseless night-birds were flying 
over the house, on their way to the far-off sea. 

"How is Mrs. Seldom getting on?" enquired Luke, 
pushing back his chair. "Is Vennie allowed to write 
to her from that place?" 

The theologian smiled. "Oh, the dear lady is per- 
fectly happy! In fact, I think she's really happier 
than when she was worrying herself about Vennie's 
future." 

"I don't like these convents," remarked Luke. 

"Few people like them," said the papal champion, 
"who have never entered them. 

"I've never seen an unhappy nun. They are 
almost too happy. They are like children. Perhaps 
they're the only persons in existence who know what 
continual, as opposed to spasmodic, happiness means. 
The happiness of sanctity is a secret that has to be 
concealed from the world, just as the happiness of 
certain very vicious people has, — for fear there 
should be no more marriages." 

"Talking of marriages," remarked Luke, "I'd give 
anything to know how our friend Gladys is getting 
on with Clavering. I expect his attitude of heroic 
pity has worn a little thin by this time. I wonder 
how soon the more earthly side of the shield will 
wear thin too! But — poor dear girl! — I do feel 



720 WOOD AND STONE 

sorry for her. Fancy having to listen to the Reverend 
Hugh's conversation by night and by day! 

"I sent her a picture post-card, the other after- 
noon, from Yeoborough — a comic one. I wonder if 
she snapped it up, and hid it, before her husband 
came down to breakfast!" 

The jeering tone of the man jarred a little on 
Mr. Taxater's nerves. 

"I think I understand," he thought to himself, 
"why it is that he praises the aristocracy." 

To change the conversation, he reverted to Miss 
Seldom's novitiate. 

"Vennie was very indignant with me for remaining 
so long in London, but I am glad now that I did. 
None of our little arrangements — eh, my friend? — 
would have worked out so well as her Napoleonic 
directness. That shows how wise it is to stand aside 
sometimes and let things take their course." 

"Romer doesn't stand aside," laughed Luke. "I'd 
give a year of my life to know what he felt when 
Dangelis carried those people away! But I suppose 
we shall never know. 

"I wonder if it's possible that there's any truth in 
that strange idea of Vennie's that Leo's Hill has a 
definite evil power over this place? Upon my soul 
I'm almost inclined to wish it has! God, how it 
does rain!" 

He looked at his watch. "I shall have to go down 
to the station in a minute," he remarked. 

One curious feature of this conversation between 
the two men was that there began to grow up a deep 
and vague irritation in Mr. Taxater's mind against 
his companion. Luke's tone when he alluded to that 



THE GOAT AND BOY 721 

picture-card — "a comic one" — struck him as touch- 
ing a depth of cynical inhumanity. 

The theologian could not help thinking of that gor- 
geous-coloured image of the wayward girl, represented 
as Ariadne, which now hung in the entrance-hall of 
her father's house. He recalled the magnificent pose 
of the figure, and its look of dreamy exultation. 
Somehow, the idea of this splendid heathen creature 
being the wife of Clavering struck his mind as a re- 
volting incongruity. For such a superb being to be 
now stretching out hopeless arms towards her Nevil- 
ton lover, — an appeal only answered by comic 
post-cards, — struck his imagination as a far bitterer 
commentary upon the perversity of the world than 
that disappearance of Vennie into a convent which 
seemed so to shock Luke. 

He extended his legs and fumbled with the gold 
cross upon his watch-chain. He seemed so clearly 
to visualize the sort of look which must now be 
settling down on that pseudo-priest's ascetic face. 
He gave way to an immoral wish that Claver- 
ing might take to drink. He felt as though he 
would sooner have seen Gladys fallen to the streets 
than thus made the companion of a monkish 
apostate. 

He wondered how on earth it had been managed 
that Mr. Romer had remained ignorant of the cause 
of Dangelis' flight and the girl's precipitate marriage. 
It was inconceivable that he should be aware of 
these things and yet retain this imperturbable young 
man in his employment. How craftily Gladys must 
have carried the matter through ! Well, — she was 
no doubt paying the penalty of her double-dyed 



722 WOOD AND STONE 

deceptions now. The theologian experienced a sick 
disgust with the whole business. 

The rain increased in violence. It seemed as though 
the room where they sat was isolated from the whole 
world by a flood of down-pouring waves. The gods 
of the immense Spaces were weeping, and man, in his 
petty preoccupation, could only mutter and stare. 

Luke rose to his feet. "To Romer and his Stone- 
Works," he cried, emptying his glass at one gulp 
down his throat, "and may he make me their 
Manager!" 

Mr. Taxater also rose. "To the tears that wash 
away all these things," he said, "and the Necessity 
that was before them and will be after them." 

They went out of the house together, and the 
silence that fell between them was like the silence 
at the bottom of deep waters. 



THE END 






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